BBC Sherlock Collage

A few weeks ago, I had nothing to do over the weekend, so I decided to do something that usually leaves me frustrated and sticky. Yes, I'm talking about collaging.

If you know me in person, you know full well that I have a slight obsession with the BBC show Sherlock. I decided to pay homage to the series by making art for my shrine room.

So I set out on my journey with little more than a few magazines (the kind that companies send to you around the holidays with colorful, glossy ads), a glue stick, and a pencil and paper. And in the end, I was really proud of my creation!

For this project (if you choose to accept it) you will need:
~Several magazines with lots of colorful pages
~Glue (I used a glue stick but I usually prefer using watered-down Elmer's)
~A light pencil sketch. If you cannot draw proportionally for your life, you can always trace an image from the computer
~Scissors, both for cutting up the magazines and for snipping off the edges once you're done
~Glossy sealant - I used watered-down ModPodge

Instructions:

1. Choose some magazine pages that you like and cut them into roughly 1/2 inch squares. You can cut them to the exact size you need once you figure out where you're going to put each one.

2. Start gluing the background down. It takes forever and is very tedious but if you work on it diligently, it'll look great!

Above is my beginning photo. If you look carefully, you can see the outline of what will soon be John's head.

At this point, I realized that John had begun to look like Moriarty, which was a bit not good. If you don't like some of the little details, you can fix them when you start to do the foreground.

...And ta-da! The background is finished!

3. Now, you can start on the foreground. Personally, I can't do miniscule details, so I decided to just go ahead and make silhouettes.

So that's Sherlock's head finished... 

...And they're finished! Well, almost. 

You can sort of see that I rounded out John's nose again so he looked Johnish again.

I'm sorry about the picture quality, I took them with my iPad because I had misplaced my camera.

4. Now, at this point, I was just relieved to be able to wash my hands, because they had been covered in glue for the past hour at least. Let this dry for NO LESS than a few hours, I left it alone for a few days because school and midterms and homework got in the way.

5. Now, if you want to be done, you can be! However, the glue I used (Elmer's Repositionable Glue Stick) wanted to be evil and still be sticky even after it had been drying for a few days. My friend (she's ridiculously good at art) recommended that I use watered-down ModPodge, so I did. That stuff is fantastic. Seriously. It is now all shiny and smooth and looks great!

Thanks so much for reading this tutorial and I hope you enjoyed it!

~Sara

P.S. If you caught the two Sherlock references in this post, I award you twenty brownie points :)