This was a fun project! I was asked by Hillside Community Allotment Association who wanted to set up a new community allotment in the grounds of my local school Hillside Primary to create images to try to promote public interest in the project and attract volunteers. They needed a logo for the group and images/visual identity to use for publicity and asked me to think of some ideas.
Immediately the medium of collage came to mind as it is appealing and has a hand crafted look. Also stencilled lettering or hand-painted lettering, like you see on fruit and vegetable crates. I hadn't really explored collage before. My favourite medium is paint, but I combined painting and cutting by hand painting textures on to sheets of paper, which I then cut into shapes, adding painted details here and there and combined these with found collage materials, such as netting, bark, skeleton leaves, food wrappers/packaging, origami paper etc.
Having produced a logo and one or two allotment related images, I went further. At this stage there was no completed allotment - simply a plot of land, a shed, a greenhouse made from lemonade bottles and one or two cleared beds. And a very attractive grassed, arena-shaped mound in the centre. What was needed was a visualization of how it could look. So I created an A2 sized collage from imagination. It took about a month to do and I got more and more used to cutting tiny pieces. I didn't want it to be too two-dimensional or too realistic in approach so used painted cameos of figures and wildlife.
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