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Introduction

Hello and welcome! Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon; wherever you are and whenever it may be. My name is Diende and I've been creating collages and multimedia artworks for around 4 years now. I also like collecting stuff from the internet.

Diende Collages

Making collages has become a huge facet in my art, and as my love for the artform has grown, so has my body of work. I've done a lot of editorial work, personal artworks, and even commissioned collages, and my love has not faded away not a single bit. I wanted to make this website because I believe in one thing, which is that sharing is caring. I've developed a lot of notes and gathered plenty of resources for the past 4 years when it comes to collage, and it'd be a shame if I just kept it all to myself.

What's collage?​

Collage, according to Merriam Webster, comes in two definitions:

1. an artistic composition made of various materials (such as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface

I will discuss more of this later, but this is a good place to start. Unlike most art forms, collage art often depends on other art as a source. Keep that in mind.

What's cccollage?​

I named the website cccollage as it stands for Crash Course Collage. This is not, however, a means to declare ground rules and laws for who-can-do-what-kind-of collage. Nuh uh. This site began as a means of sharing, not as a means to course-correct the artform—and it will remain that way. I will be using this site to share information, tips, and resources to help you with collage, while also preserving these things on a platform.

Why do I love collage?​

Well actually, I didn’t start off by loving collage. Collage-making to me is really more of an offset rather than a direct result of what I actually love to do: which is archiving. Since I was a kid, I loved collecting little scraps of notes, letters, newspaper cutouts, posters, or just trash I refused to throw away (cleaned though, don’t worry). It might be from a gift I received, a trip I took, or anything that looked remotely interesting enough to keep, and I’d tuck them away in “memorabilia boxes” around my room.

Then I took an art class, in which one of our projects was to make our own collage. Although that was my first exposure to the collage artform, it didn’t quite stick with me yet.

Eventually, my memorabilia boxes turned digital. I started to love the idea of exploring websites–especially the more forum-styled ones before social media engulfed our internet–and finding these gems that people post and obsess about. There are pictures, artworks, and even paintings that I’ve found on some websites with no other copy anywhere else–and knowing that nothing really stays even in this digital age, I’d save them on the family laptop. Eventually the obsession gradually started snowballing: I’d go through Wikipedia articles, public domain sites, and start saving things on my own computer (now a hard drive, for safekeeping), until finally I started thinking, “I’d love to do a collage with this.”

Ever since then, archiving has become a lot more serious for me: a way to keep a preservation of digital copies, ad as I’d archive more and more, I’d also continue making more collages. The snowball has become a boulder which I’d happily keep pushing.

Goal of cccollage​

Archiving, to me, comes from an inherent desire to preserve what I love, but collage comes from a desire to honor and pay tribute to the same things I love.

Every collage artwork is very much about the parts as much as it is the sum of its parts. Collage is an act of both reclamation–to make what came before as your own–and dedication–an ode to the artists that help make your art now.

Statement

What I want to do, at the most, is to get you started in doing collages. What I want to do at the very least, is to make this a love letter to collage and everything about it. To spotlight the game that I love, to preserve what I know, and hopefully to swoon you enough that you would understand it.