Most young schoolchildren will have had some experience using mixed mediacollage, inspired by Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, first published in 1969. But there’s no reason why older children can’t carry on with more sophisticated techniques.

Experimentation with collage began around a century ago, and the form has been used in picture-book illustrations for decades. But it can be used to create a look that will be perceived as avant-garde, in step with current trends in plundergraphics and, in pop music, plunderphonics, or “sampling”.

In awarding author-illustrator Lauren Child the Kate Greenaway Medal earlier this year for I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato (Orchard Books), the Library Association turned the spotlight on mixed media collage in picture-books. But from the point of view of anyone who values hard-earned drawing and painting skills, collage can appear to be “cheating”. How do you distinguish clever use of quoted imagery from plagiarism and laziness?

Collage may not require drawing skills, but it does make demands on an illustrator’s critical and design skills. First and foremost is the choice of source material. For instance, a cut-out of a glamorously made-up eye hoisted away from its fashion context and stuck incongruously upon a crudely drawn face is a familiar collage trick, but this simple act can spur an intelligent discussion about recontextualisation. What is the eye’s original meaning? How does it change in its new location? Why did the artist use a cut-out instead of drawing an eye?

Recontextualisation is one of the most powerful and amusing uses of collage. Familiar symbols and icons can be heavily loaded with meaning, and setting them in a different context often mocks the authority of any symbol and its meaning. The official symbols of government carry a great deal of power, which is why money, postage stamps, and tickets are so enticing to collage artists. The same goes for religious symbols and corporate logos. Children love recontextualising: subverting the symbols of the grown-up world gives them a great sense of power. Drawing a cartoon moustache on a serious portrait seems to be eternally funny, simply because the austere figure in the portrait remains unaware of having been made ridiculous.

But this is only one aspect of collage; contemporary picture-book artists use the full range. Lane Smith uses collage when a painted version of an image would not be as powerful as a quoted image; an example is the pictures of US presidents that appear in Maths Curse (Puffin).

Lauren Child exploits that special queasy quality of low-grade food photography in I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato. Shawn Tan makes use of narrative fragments of scientific writings in The Lost Thing (Lothian BooksRagged Bears). Sara Fanelli and Lydia Monks bring to their work a strong sense of design with careful attention to the use of colour (a sort of “grown-up” Very Hungry Caterpillar approach). Nina Laden uses cut-out textured shapes for their three-dimensional quality in Roberto, the Insect Architect (Chronicle BooksRagged Bears), rejigging forms to achieve a subtly wonky and compelling photo-realistic effect.

Collecting an arsenal of clippings for collage can be an interesting exercise in itself. Once made aware of the graphic value of ephemera, pupils can be constantly on the lookout for potentially useful source material. The material can be sorted into broad categories of textures, narrative fragments, and icons. This third category is probably the most interesting, as it can spur a discussion of what an icon is in the first place.

Experimenting with mixed mediacollage might be a great relief to children who are insecure about their drawing abilities (this same insecurity is the reason most of them stop drawing around puberty). Surrounded as they are by global brands and other commercial imagery, it might be liberating for pupils to try thumbing their noses at them, making icons their own, reinventing them, and denying them their original intent. Budding subversives will find this habit hard to quit.

Author-illustrator Ted Dewan’s latest picture book, Baby Gets the Zapper, is published by Doubleday