Painting from a Collage Project

I developed this collage to painting project for the advanced painting class I teach at the Alicia Trevino Lopez Center.  Pictured are the collage I used to inspire my own painting for demonstration.  Many of my senior painters rely on magazine images for inspiration and I wanted to give them a different way to inspire their ideas while creating an original work of art.  We talked about the history and process of collage and looked at the work of Picasso, Raoul Haussman and Richard Hamilton.  For this project, they used found images, but not in their entirety.  Bits and pieces of magazine images and photographs were combined to create their composition, which was then used as the basis for their paintings.  I demonstrated blocking in the painting with quick sweeps of color before going in to work on the details. Loosely developing the painting all at once is creating a lot more unity, and relieving the stress of 'ruining it'...after all, once it dries it can be painted over.  The project is creating some surreal painters out of my landscape and portrait enthusiasts!