Taking on the Vintage Magazine Challenge

By Les Jones : Editor of Contemporary Collage Magazine

Our Vintage Magazine Challenge has been very popular with artists across the world. I did the challenge when we first launched it a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t done it again since. I thought it was about time I dived back in. My magazine (chosen at random) was a copy of Woman from the 1954. The essence of the challenge is to create five new collages in response to five prompts from a list of nine, which are sent out with the challenge. The only rule is, the collages must be made solely from the content of the magazine. The five briefs I chose were; a collage on the theme of the magazine; a collage with a message; a monochrome collage; an abstract collage; and a typographic collage.

If you have a lot of collage materials, it’s often easy to get phased by the sheer choice of papers that are available to you. So, working with just one magazine, far from being limiting, it’s actually quite freeing. I spent the first 45 mins going through the magazine cutting out elements that I thought would be useful for the challenges. The first brief I tackled was the ‘collage with a message’. One of the fragments I’d cut out said ‘true stories of real people’ - that became my central message. From there, I built the collage intuitively, piece by piece.

I decided to approach each collage, one after the other, in one sitting (or one standing in my case). Each of the briefs took me off on a different tangent and I found myself tuning into small details of the magazine that I might ordinarily overlook.

The session lasted just under three hours, but it flew by. I was in a flow state, thoroughly enjoying the process and the directions the different prompts were taking me in.

Here are the five collages I created - they’re all A5 in size…

If you’d like to try the Vintage Magazine Challenge, click on the button below. If you do get involved, be sure to send us some good quality pics of your collages and you could be featured in the magazine or on this blog. Good luck and enjoy the challenge. Les