Think Crafts Blog - Craft Ideas and Projects - CreateForLess

All collages (whether you realized it or not) follow several basic elements of design. Balanced with these elements must be your own personal likes and dislikes of your collage. You can be technically perfect in any piece of art or craft, but if the finished piece is not pleasing to you as the artisan there is no reason to put in the investment of time, effort and money! It may appear that a collage artist has just randomly thrown a bit of this and a touch of that to a collage, but if you take a few minutes to really study a collage you will find each material added to the collage design serves a purpose. A brief review of the elements of design include consideration for:

• Lines: There will be a border or boundary where you collage begins and ends. You might build a collage on a greeting card or on a sheet of copier paper. The size of this base will limit your boundaries. Also within your collage you may incorporate straight, curved or even broken lines with paper, paint and other embellishments.
• Shapes: Expanding the limitations of lines. You can bring in circles, squares, rectangles and triangles. These elements may have clean edges or be torn edges of paper and other materials. But, there are shapes seen and some hidden in all collages. With shapes comes a pattern, which are the visual patterns you create using your collage materials. Patterns give texture and dimension to the overall collage design. When combining lines and shapes, you will also want to consider size. You’ll want to mix and match the sizes from large to small no matter what the finished size of the collage will be.
• Color: Colors may coordinate, compliment or contrast. Colors may be bold, bright, muted, highlighted or shaded. Under the category of color is another term, value. Value is the expression of light or dark within a color and then looking at the bigger picture the tones or hues from white to black.
• Motion: Also referred to as movement. The way you place your collage materials will give a ‘map’ to the viewer’s eye. Consider where you want to grab the viewer’s eye and how you wish for him/her to look at your collage.

These are the same elements of design used in altered art such as the popular altered books. The altered look is basically a collage of images, words, and photos mixed with art and craft supplies like ink, paint, charms, buttons, tags, and an endless list of other embellishments.