Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Although this book does have some good ideas, it was disappointing. It might be called "The Art Of Paper Collage," but clearly the author comes from the world of scrapbooking and rubber stamping, not from the world of collage as a fine art. The examples she includes of her own work tend either toward Biblical themes or toward family memorabilia (ex: one collage is called "My Dad"). The writing style is oddly stilted. For example, instead of saying "You will find..." she chooses "It will be found that..." That kind of writing gets old very quickly, and should have been edited out. Explanations tend to be sparse. In the section about doing an acrylic underpainting,for example, there is very little information about how to do one, or about how to mesh the underpainting with the collage elements. There is also a strange lack of information about some tried-and-true elements of collage art, such as archival tissue and the many types of acrylic medium and acrylic modeling paste, and only a cursory look at Oriental papers, while an entire section is devoted to some new products that are of dubious value, such as glitter spray. I was dismayed, furthermore, to find that most of the products featured in that section just happen to be sold by a company the author is associated with. I ended up feeling like I had just spent a lot of money on an elaborate ad. Not only that, there is some misinformation: she claims that water-soluble polymer glues are considered archival "because they are reversible." That is NOT what makes a product archival--if that were the case, kindergarten paste would be considered archival. There are other, much better, books about the art of collage out there, if you are serious about the artistic aspects of it. Look for the ones by Nita Leland and Virginia Williams, and Gerald Brommer. Both are far better written, represent a much broader range of styles, and are not nearly as commercially self-serving.