
I am quite a fan of Julie Nutting’s distinctive artwork. Long legged, rather old fashioned dollies with newsprint skin and no faces.. and they are adorable! And here, in her lovely book, Collage Couture, she explains how to create beautiful couture dolls for use in your own artwork.
Title – Collage Couture: Techniques for Creating Fashionable Art
Author – Julie Nutting
Publisher – Create Mixed Media
ISBN – 978-1-4403-0831-4
Learn new techniques
Collage Couture will encourage even a nervous new artist to grab pens, paper and glue and start creating. Lots of mixed media techniques are explained by Julie, in a friendly, easy to follow way. She demonstrates how to draw the fashion dollies, and how to customize them so you have your own unique characters.
Lots of different mixed media and collage techniques are included, to give you a good range of skills.
There may not be very much that is new to the more experienced mixed media artist, but Julie’s unique style may well still spark new ideas and projects.

22 Projects to try
There are 22 projects, each featuring a different fashion doll and introducing a couple of new techniques. Clearly you are not expected to want to slavishly copy Julie’s creations (indeed that would be hard with collage) but to take the general ideas and, coupled with the various skills you are learning, use them as inspiration to create exciting and satisfying artwork of your own.

The opening chapter also discusses how to draw fashion dolls in a few different ways, from the traditional to the super-easy-rather-cheating-but-heh. Julie is well known for not giving her dollies faces but there is also a section on how to draw cute faces too.
Julie also mentions ways in which you can use your finished art as gifts as well as pure display pieces.

Beautifully illustrated
OK, I will confess that the main reason I adore this book is all the lovely illustrations. There are full page pictures of the finished projects, nice clear close-ups of the techniques being shown, and plenty to whet the creative appetite.
There are also a couple of templates that you can use in your own creations. I particularly like the jointed
Parisian doll and suspect I will be using and adapting that template for quite a few diverse projects.

Summary
This is a friendly, entertaining book, written in a personal one-on-one style and throughout you will feel that Julie is chatting away to you.
If you are considering dipping you toe in to the world of mixed media and collage then this book will equip you with many of the techniques that you will use on a day to day basis. The book is primarily about collaged “fashionable art” but much of the content can easily be adapted to other genres too.
A beautiful book that is a joy to flick through, to read and to learn new ideas from. Definitely one of my favourites.

Collage Couture on Amazon
Here are links to Collage Couture on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. If you purchase from these links I would get a small commission from Amazon for sending custom their way. At no extra cost to yourself. Thank you.
Collage Couture by Julie Nutting on Amazon.com
Collage Couture by Julie Nutting on Amazon.co.uk
After enjoying Collage Couture so much, I didn’t hesitate to buy Julie Nutting’s next book, Collage Couture Studio Paper Dolls as soon as it came out. Click on the title to see my review of that book.
