Taking The Watercolor Picasso Project Further

July 2, 2020
By Beth Herrild

This post is for all of you who received our June Box about Picasso, Cubism, and Abstract vs Representational Art using watercolor as our medium. The project can be taken even farther by cutting up one of your watercolor pieces (when dry), and collaging the pieces onto a heavy piece of paper. Picasso did a lot of collage and also was famous for re-arranging body parts!

1. First take a photo of the piece of artwork you are going to cut up. That way you can refer back to it later.
2. Cut the artwork into maybe 2″ or so squares or rectangles. They don’t have to all the the same size. It is easiest to keep the eyes, ears, mouth: any recognizable parts, in one piece so you can re-arrange them. In other words, don’t cut the eye in half.
3. I recommend first trying to arrange the pieces on your heavy paper the way they originally were before you cut up your artwork. This is where the photograph can come in handy.
4. Once you’ve put your artwork together the way it was, experiment with moving around some of the pieces, like you might switch the positions of the eyes – put the left one on the right and the right one on the left. Or you might move one eye down lower, or move an ear to where it doesn’t belong… You could look up some of Picasso’s paintings & collages to get ideas if you need to.

Take a virtual tour of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. Also The Guggenheim, among others, has a fairly extensive online gallery of Picasso’s work.