Collage experiment

I try to keep things a little chronological here, but I am hopefully behind with showing you the results of my screenprinting classes and the latest stamps I have made. That has everything to do with my awful skills in photography. I just can't get the photos right so I can't show you anything.

However, yesterday I made a collage and immediately photographed it and it turned out fine. The white wall is a little darker than in real, so I probably should edit it. But the colours look good and  if I wait until I have time to edit this will become one of those post that stays on my computer forever, so I just show it now as it is.

(Have you heard about fashion  magazines that have a 'no photo-editing' logo on their cover because they don't make models look better/skinnier than they are? Perhaps I should use that logo to on my blog ;). Although, now I think about it, the fasion industry has great photographers and while some of them edit to make people look better than real, I have very limited photograph skills and would use editing software to try to make the object in my picture look as good as the real thing. Conclusion: I should buy a good camera and sign up for a photography course. Or just make things that fit in my scanner.

But back to the collage. Sometimes nice package material inspires me. Especially wrappings of drinks and snacks are very appealing to me. Not surprising, as I love to eat! Anyway, when I see a nice label or something in a cafe I take it home with me. In my mind, I always make nice collages with them, but today I made one for real!

I used Ninainvorm's tutorial (sept '09) for 101woonideeen for inspiration. I had never made this kind of collage before and I thought it would look good as the background for the labels I had collected. It was more difficult than I expected but I loved doing it. I started with a A3 sized white sheet of paper, because the labels are quite large. Soon a problem arose, because I don't have a large paper collection. I used every nice paper I have in this colour combination and it took me two days, but now I am quite happy with the result, especially for a first attempt (except for postcard sized collages).

I had some problems with finding the right balance between the colours, textures and patterns. I didn't want to make it a boring piece, but I didn't want to put too much different things on it either. Somehow, it think if you would draw a line from the left corner above to then right corner below, the part above the line is more successful than the part below. What do you think?

Next time I might stamp the collage with some of my hand-carved stamps, to  make it a little more 'mine'...