Tuesday, September 4, 2012

82/365: Collage Composition & Cameras

Today I made:

digital photos to help with composition...



No power tools today. I took a break for softer things; back to working on my calendar pages. Here's a sneak peek of a summer month I'm working on.





The pages are coming together much like my art journals and scrapbook pages do. A picture is often the inspiration for both color palette and text. I like to collage in several elements (paper embellishments and ephemera) while I'm designing, but sometimes it's hard to know where things should go on the page. Mostly everything I've learned about composition in collage, I've discovered through play and trial and error. There are some general guidelines to composition (that I could spout off if I had gone to art school), but I like to trust my eye. Pieces get moved around until the composition looks "just right."

One handy trick I use is to take a digital photo of a layout or composition before attaching anything to the collage surface. Then I move things around to try a different composition and take another photo. I repeat this a few times without gluing anything down until I have three or four versions of the page on my camera. Then I flip through them to see which one is the most appealing to the eye. It helps to have options to compare side by side. It's kind of like having a studio mate and asking, "Which version do you like better?" But my pup is not much help in this area, so I go it alone with the aid of my camera.  Our eyes know what pleases us.

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