In the Studio: Original Art | Megan Coyle: Artist & Illustrator

July 24, 2011June 16, 2024

Poised Blue Dachshund

Here’s one of my latest animal collages. After spending a couple months away from working on portraits, it’s been a bit difficult getting the hang of things again. So my current portrait has been a bit of a struggle this weekend. I’m hoping to have it finished somewhat soon, but we shall see…

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. It was unusually hot here in D.C. – I spent most of the weekend dodging the heat indoors but went on a couple of walks. I’m looking forward to the coolness of fall.

July 13, 2011June 16, 2024

The Neighing Neighbor

And here’s the completed collage. The other day I got started on another portrait collage which is coming along nicely – I’m hoping to take more progress pictures of it than I did with this one.

Also, recently I heard that several of my animal collages were accepted into a group juried exhibition in North Carolina. It looks like I’ll have another road trip fairly soon. Bosty might even tag along.

March 24, 2011June 16, 2024

Mountain Land

Another day, another collage. Decided to crank out another abstract landscape piece before I dive back into my children’s book illustrations. I had to put the book project on hold for a while as I worked on the new education section of my website. So now I’m back at it – I have about four more to do, but then of course comes the editing and revisions I’ll need to do to the previous pieces. I’m getting pretty excited about it and hope to have everything completed within the next couple of months.

March 15, 2011June 16, 2024

Golden Plains

I decided to put together another abstract landscape collage today. It’s really nice to change up my technique to make these – they’re pretty fun to do. Usually I focus a lot of time on little details, and it’s nice to cut loose and just focus on color and texture while tearing paper instead of cutting it.

I’m still working away as usual. March has been a quiet month for my blog – I hope to post more next month. I’m striving to finish a couple large projects relatively soon, so once they’re completed that should free up my schedule a bit. Anyway, I’m off to work on some more illustrations.

March 9, 2011June 16, 2024

Guitar

This is a simple collage that I put together for an upcoming group exhibition. I’ve been missing in action a little bit these days when it comes to blogging – been a little tied up with a couple of large projects that I’m anxious about completing.

And next month will be another busy month – I’m making a trek to Jasper, Indiana at the end of April for my solo show and day-long workshop. So far it looks like about forty of my pieces will be on display for the exhibit. Yep, I’ve got quite a bit of planning ahead of me but I’m pretty excited about getting everything ready.

February 23, 2011June 5, 2024

Green Coffee Cup

Here’s another collage from the coated paper coffee cup series. Coated paper is much thicker than magazine pages, and I can tell a noticeable difference when working with it. With magazine pages, it’s much easier to layer the paper and work on small details. With the coated paper, it’s difficult to create several layers and I often find myself simplifying shadows and highlights. It’s interesting to change up your materials every once in a while.

In other news, I have a couple of rather large projects on my plate at the moment – there’s the children’s book which is taking quite a bit of time and the new education section of my site I’m putting together. The children’s book is taking a while to complete because it is going to consist of about thirty illustrations where the collage image is about 12”x16” – which is the medium size I work in. I’ll also need to work on the layout and edit the storyline I’ve written. The education project will take a while since I’m planning to put together several different lesson plans that are going to be somewhat interactive. So off to work I go!

February 12, 2011June 16, 2024

Experiment 3: Landscape

Landscape by collage artist Megan Coyle — “Experiment 3: Landscape.”
Collage on paper. 7″x5″
Order a print

Another experimental piece of mine. It’s fun trying something new, although I must admit, I enjoy my usual style of “painting with paper” much better than creating abstract pieces. However, it is pretty therapeutic putting together torn bits of paper.

I set my children’s book illustrations aside for a couple of weeks, but I’m back to working on them. And I’ve started planning an educational section that I’ll add to my website sometime in the future. I get emails from teachers every once in a while who use my artwork in their classrooms, and I thought it might be nice to put something together that could help them with their lesson plans.

Anyway, hope everyone is having a great weekend!

February 11, 2011June 16, 2024

Experiment 2: Landscape

Every now and then I’ll do some planning for my workshop in Jasper, Indiana. I like taking my time when it comes to planning for exhibitions and lectures, so that way I can ensure everything is taken care of and that I’m well prepared. So bit by bit I’ve been working on examples that I’ll share with the class.

Above is another experimental piece. Again it looks much different than any of my other work. This is more like playing with the materials and seeing what results I can get. It also helps me think about what projects I can have for the class. This piece is an abstract landscape made entirely from tearing magazine strips. You can see that some of the pieces have more obvious tears while others are pretty subtle.

February 7, 2011February 10, 2018

Ryan and His Sweetheart

I like the story behind this collage: Recently the guy who owns the domain megancoyle.com contacted me. I wanted that domain when I first put my website together, but had to settle with megancoyle.com since another Megan Coyle had a site up and running on megancoyle.com. So the owner contacted me, telling me that his client, another Megan, no longer used her website. Thus the web address wasn’t being used and was pointing to an error page, although the owner was still paying money for the domain. So he offered to do a trade – he’d transfer the domain to my account if I made a collage for him.

Above is the collage that I made for him. The challenge with this piece was that it was one of my smaller sized collages, and I wasn’t doing a portrait of one, but two people. I had to cut the magazine strips pretty small, but I’m pleased that it came together in the end.

February 1, 2011June 16, 2024

Experiment 1: Non-Objective Art

These past couple of days I’ve been doing some planning for my workshop in April. Part of my prep work includes coming up with projects that the class will work on and creating my own samples to share with the students. I’ve decided that one technique I’ll share is creating non-objective art with magazine strips. I never create abstract pieces myself, but I decided to give it a go with this small collage.

At the moment, I’m also working on a small portrait piece. I’ll share an image of that collage once it’s complete.

Hope everyone had a happy January! Can’t believe it’s already been 2011 for a month!