How to Collage

It is a rather warm day here in Garrett County Maryland.   I am using the heat as an excuse to be in my studio working on collages.   They have gotten a lot of attention lately so I thought I would give a brief explanation of how I make a collage.  
I start with  white rice papers of all kinds of textures.  I tear the paper into chunks about 8x 10 and stain them with my watercolors.   I try to get a variety of values for each color on my palatte.   When the papers are dry, I bag them in 1 quart ziplock bags so that I have a whole color palatte of rice papers which are now colored.
I do a piece the same way I approach doing a painting.  First quick value sketch, transfer it to a board and start ripping up the rice papers and glueing.    It is a mess with little papers all over my table, glue on my fingers and a kind of weird progression taking place on the piece.   Eventually it seems to come together into a "painting" which is really a collage.  It is always a surprise to me when one turns out.