Establish a Theme for Your Collage

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lanie Evans and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to show you how you can make a collage. The one that we're going to make today is going to be called Theme and Variations. It's very simple to make. Basically you're taking a shape and you're going to vary it either by color or by size. Take a look at what I got started. I have some examples of some that I have made in the past using a rectangle shape and rectangle pieces of magazine paper. Here I've used more book paper and it has a more aged look to it. And I've also cut out interesting words that kind of stand out. Over here I have just simple shapes; some diamonds, a half semi-circle. So really you can use any shape. The first thing I want to do is use a piece of paper to glue my colors on, my colored paper. So I'm going to use a paintbrush in just some regular glue to brush on. You can use it straight out of the bottle. I just would recommend that you not use too much glue because it makes the paper slide around a bit. Glue sticks also work really well in this situation. Rubber cement also another possibility. So I'm going to just take the paper and layer a pattern over it. I'm going take pink and brown. Okay now that I have the pattern glued down in a brown and a pink pattern, ideally you want to let the glue set and dry a bit before you go and cut out your shapes. I'm going to take a marker, a permanent marker and draw directly on top of the papers. I'm going to do a diamond since I have many of those already done. And now you're going to cut out your shape. Cut on the inside of the black lines so that you don't have that border, although you like the border you could include it. So for this collage I'm going to use my theme is the diamond or kind of a kite shape. Here my variation is in vertical stripes or rather horizontal stripes here, vertical stripes here. Here my stripes are diagonal. I have also size as a variation and these are brown. I also have color as well as size in these as a variation. So now that I have many shapes to work from, I'm going to choose a background to have as my collage. This is a gift from a child, so I'm going to use this. I like the star. I'm going to use something thick like a cardstock to glue that paper onto. So I'm going to go ahead and take care of that first. Now it's mounted, ready to begin the design. So I'll take all of these and the beauty of these is if they're too big I can cut them down to fit. So to begin, basically I'm just going to start laying them down and seeing forms a more interesting and unique composition. And don't be afraid to let some of the pieces come off the edge, it actually lets the viewer come into composition a bit more. And this is my favorite one because it has all these little insect pieces in here so I want that to be enthronement piece. Now that I found a design that works for me, I'm going to start gluing them down. I'm going to pick them up and just paint the glue on the back. You want to kind of rub them into place so that they get a good seal. So now that I have my pieces glued on, these guys need to come off. I need to turn it over and see where I need to trim them off of the cardstock. And here's my final composition."