The Color Before the Collage: How I Build the Palette That Builds the Work
There is a moment, before any cutting begins, before any glue touches paper, when the real work of making collage happens. It happens on a cutting mat covered in sorted piles of color. It happens quietly, sometimes slowly, with nothing but my eyes and a growing understanding of what the work wants to become.
That moment is what I want to share with you today.
First: What Is Collage?
If you are new to the word, collage comes from the French coller — to glue. At its most elemental, collage is the art of assembling fragments: cut or torn pieces of paper, fabric, found imagery, text, and ephemera layered together to create something new. Picasso and Braque pioneered it in the early twentieth century. Hannah Höch weaponized it. Joseph Cornell made it mysterious. Robert Rauschenberg made it monumental.
But collage is also one of the oldest human impulses — the desire to take what is scattered, forgotten, or discarded, and find the composition hiding inside it. That is what I do. And it begins long before I pick up a pair of scissors.
The Gathering
I am always collecting. Not obsessively — joyfully. A walk through my neighborhood in Lafayette, Indiana yields more than exercise. It yields color. A fragment of packaging caught against a fence. A paint chip from a hardware store I duck into out of curiosity. Pages from books found at estate sales, their edges worn soft with age. Tissue papers. Wallpaper samples. The inside lining of an envelope. Wrapping paper saved from a birthday. Handmade papers I source from specialty suppliers, their surfaces textured like dried riverbeds or the skin of a melon.
I also rescue papers. Not every sheet I work with is pristine. Some are stained, water-damaged, torn in ways that most people would call ruined. I call them interesting. A tide mark left by moisture becomes a horizon line. A crease becomes a shadow. The "damage" becomes the detail that makes a piece feel lived-in rather than manufactured.
This is one of the things I love most about collage as a practice: it is inherently an act of reclamation. Nothing is wasted. Everything has potential.
The Sorting
What you see in the image above is my studio at one of my favorite stages of the process: the color sort.
Before I begin a new body of work, I pull everything I have gathered — sometimes accumulated over months — and I sort it. Not by subject. Not by texture or source. By color.
The piles that emerge tell me things I did not know I knew. I can see immediately where I am drawn this season, what I have been noticing on my walks, what the world has been offering me without my quite realizing I was accepting it. A larger pile of terracotta and burnt orange tells me something about where my attention has been living. An unexpected abundance of dusty purple suggests I have been seeking something — a mood, a resonance — that I have not yet fully articulated.
This is not arbitrary. It is rooted in color theory that I have studied seriously for years.
What the Piles Are Really Telling Me
Albert Munsell, the American painter and educator who developed the Munsell Color System in the early twentieth century, gave us one of the most rigorous frameworks for understanding color relationships ever produced. His system describes color across three dimensions: hue (the color family — red, yellow, blue), value (lightness to darkness), and chroma (the intensity or saturation of the color).
When I sort my papers, I am instinctively working with all three of Munsell's dimensions simultaneously, even when I am not consciously naming them. I notice which reds are high chroma — vivid, almost aggressive — and which have been muted by texture or age into something quieter and more complex. I notice where the value shifts within a pile, how a pale blush sitting beside a deep burgundy creates a conversation across the full range of a single hue family.
Josef Albers, whose landmark work Interaction of Color demonstrated that colors do not exist in isolation but are always transformed by their neighbors, is another framework I return to constantly. The color I see in isolation on my cutting mat will not be the color I see once it is placed next to another paper in the composition. That relationship is everything. Sorting into piles allows me to contemplate those potential relationships before I commit.
Johannes Itten, who taught color at the Bauhaus alongside Albers, wrote extensively about the emotional and expressive qualities of color — the warmth of yellow, the weight of violet, the tension of complementary pairs. When I look at my sorted piles, I am reading them emotionally as much as analytically. What does this pile of orange feel like at nine in the morning? What does it feel like at dusk? Those answers matter to the work I make.
The Contemplation
There is a practice I want to name that does not have an official term in art theory but that I consider essential to my process: sitting with the piles.
I do not immediately begin cutting after I sort. I look. I move pieces around within a pile. I place a fragment from one pile against a fragment from another. I let my eyes rest on color combinations that surprise me, or disturb me, or make something in my chest lift unexpectedly. I ask myself what each pile is saying, and what happens when they begin to speak to each other.
This is where intuition and knowledge meet. The theory gives me a language for what I am seeing. The contemplation gives me permission to trust what I feel.
And Then — the Joy
After all of this looking and thinking, something shifts. The work stops being a question and becomes an answer. My hands know before my mind does. I pick up the scissors and the glue and the cutting mat fills with fragments and everything I have gathered and sorted and studied and felt moves through my hands into something that did not exist before.
That is collage. That is why I make it.
The sorted piles you see in the image above are the beginning of the Conversations in Color collection — work rooted in mid-century modernism, in the belief that color carries meaning and that geometry can speak. Some of these papers will become products you can hold in your hands: a mug, a journal, a print on your wall. Some will become original works. All of them began exactly like this.
With a pile. With color. With the patient act of looking before making.
Kerrie Bellisario is the artist and founder of It's a Colorful Life, a Lafayette, Indiana studio and shop bringing original collage art into everyday objects. Shop the collections at itsacolorfullife.shop.