Collage - Prepping adhesives & examples - Collage adhesives - Q - Tip technique

When collaging, clean excess adhesive off the front of an image with a Q-Tip. Employ the Q-Tip technique with adhesives for collage with tips from a professi...

So, after we've placed our piece down with our glue-stick glue, in order to keep things clean, one of the things that tends to happen when you're doing glue sticks is that you don't actually want any glue on the up-side of your scrap piece that you're gluing down. So if that does happen, this is why we always have clean towels or clean rags to work with. You just sort of take, and this is also a way of pressing out the piece so that all corners match, down to the surface of the paper, so you don't have any loose edges. We're going to go ahead and use our rag to wipe that surface clean. That's why you always want the rag to be clean and not have glue on it itself, so that that doesn't transfer on to there. You can also use your Q-tips. If your edges are not quite down as much as you like, or if there's some glue that tends to kind of push out after you've laid it down, you use your Q-tip to sort of run along the edge, place your edge down, as well as wipe away the excess glue. So you want to keep these things handy at all times as you're moving along, because there's always going to be a little messiness.