5 Most Important Elements when Designing a Collage: A Beginners Guide to Paper Crafts

These 5 elements are all of the design elements the paper crafts or collage artist must consider when creating a collage.

5 Important Elements in Collage: A Beginners Guide to Paper Crafts

Collage is a valid art form, and as such, there are very specific elements that make a collage design work or not work.

Usually, your eyes can tell you if a collage is properly designed or not. You can see what works and what does not in collage, even if you cannot verbalize it. Here is a basic guide to the seven most important design elements in collage.

I have always used collage to explore color, design, new ideas, and paper crafts supplies. I find that taking a half-worked or abandoned painting and re-creating it with collage can be artistically rewarding as well as profitable. In my very first art show invitational, I sold both of the pieces I entered, which were both collages. I still receive requests for copies of those collages.

1. Color Choice

"It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form." - Hans Hoffman, German Abstract Painter

In collage, as in other paper crafts there are no right and wrong colors. It is possible, however to mis-match colors and complements, or to use too many colors. Just as you can muddy up a watercolor painting with too many paint colors, you can also muddy up, or brown out a paper crafts collage.

In order to properly use color in your collages, brush up on
color theory, even if it means making your own color wheel. Make that your first paper crafts project. Collage together a color wheel.

Another important aspect of color to consider is the Value of the color. Using a combination of both dark colors and light colors in your collages add depth to your paper crafts images.

Both color and value can impart a mood or feeling to the viewer.

2. Line

In paper crafts including collage "lines" are not drawn or painted, they are created by the actual pieces of paper that adhered to the support. The lines in collages direct the eyes.

3. Movement

"The goal of every artist is to stop movement, which is life...and to maintain it fixed so that one hundred years later, when a stranger may gaze at it, it will once again move, because it is life." - William Faulkner

Line in paper crafts brings up the next important element in collage: movement. Movement on a static paper craft can be a hard collage element to grasp, in our digital world.

Movement is what encourages your eyes to move around the paper. Where items are placed in paper crafts can direct where the eyes move, and what the eyes see first.

In collage movement can be created with contrasting lines juxtaposed. Direct the collage viewer's eye movements with size and placement of objects. Experiment with horizontal, diagonal, circular, triangular, and vertical movement.

4. Pattern

"Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes." - Francis Bacon

Pattern is one way to encourage movement in paper crafts. Pattern is a repetition of an item in a collage. That pattern is not just based on shape, which is what we typically think when we hear the word pattern.

In paper crafts, pattern can also refer to repetition of a color, a word (in text-based collages) or the size of an object.

In collage, pattern can also be created by repeating the use one type of paper over another, and contrasting it to other papers on the collage.

5. Shape

"There are universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off." - Henry Moore.

Shape is also an important design element in paper crafts. The shapes in the paper crafts can be formal and geometric. Their edges can be straight and sharp.

Or, the shapes can be more organic, and torn by hand. Round and spiral elements are also more natural feeling than square and triangular shapes.

A well-designed collage can rely on either type of shape, or it can combine the shapes, as long as one type remains dominant in the overall design.

Another important aspect to consider when selecting shape in paper crafts is the size of the elements.