Creating and Maximizing Collages

The past few weeks have been super busy. I've been working a lot on jewelry, mostly on domino pendants, as well as a special order for some mosaic earrings. So far I've completed 24 domino pendants. I haven't photographed any of them yet, but I did photograph the earrings before I shipped them to the buyer.

The earrings have designs on both sides so something pretty is always visible while they're being worn. Here's a view of one side:

©2014 Lynn Edwards

Another project was this mini collage, pictured below. It came about somewhat serendipitously. I was fooling around with some painted scraps, placing them side by side just to see how they looked together, when a design began to emerge.

"Auditioning" various papers to see how they look next to each other is an intrinsic part of the collage process. It's one of the most enjoyable, too.

About two dozen individual pieces of paper form the collage. As you can see, only half of the papers in the photo above became part of the finished work. Evaluating what works and what doesn't, what enhances and what detracts, is what makes collage so much fun to do.

©2014 Lynn Edwards

I'll be offering this mini-collage in my Etsy shop next month as I stock my shop for the holidays. Wouldn't this make a sweet little addition to someone's office cubicle? At 3x4 inches it's original fine art -- in miniature!

I've also been creating 6x8 inch freeform collages on watercolor paper. My plan is to turn these into greeting cards. Looking them over, it occurred to me that by cutting them in half, each would fit nicely on a blank greeting card if a slightly larger piece of colored card stock was inserted beneath the collage.

As luck would have it, all of them looked just fine when cut in two -- no compositional adjustments needed. So six 6x8 inch collages yielded a dozen 3x4 inch pieces. To get even more mileage from them I'll scan them so I can use portions of these images in future works. When I photograph the domino pendants I'll photograph the cards and will eventually post pics of all. But for now these photos of the earrings and the mini-collage will have to do.

Text and images ©2014 Lynn Edwards