Digital Collage: The New Face of Mixed Media Art

Your first grade teacher probably sent you at a stack of newspapers and magazines with a pair of scissors, beckoning you to cut out your favorite pictures and words. After you had found a few photos, illustrations, and random pieces of text, you glued them to a piece of construction paper. That was your first and perhaps only introduction to collage, unless you helped your mother with scrapbook projects when you were a little older or became serious about art.

The practice of physically finding something and manually attaching it to a flat surface, be it card or poster board, has acquired a digital equivalent called "digital collage." Using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and similar programs, you can now assemble all your collage elements on the computer. You can include anything that can be converted into a computer image file (JPG, GIF, PIC, etc.), from scanned documents to digital photographs to vector illustrations.

Besides the benefit of not getting your fingers sticky, working in a digital medium grants you a lot more control over your piece. How many times have you accidentally snipped a magazine picture in half or unintentionally torn a family photo? If you make a mistake on the computer, you can almost always amend it by resorting to "Apple+Z." On Photoshop, it's easy to manipulate proportions, textures, colors, light/contrast, and numerous other aspects of any of your drawings or photos. For maximum craftsmanship, you can even edit pixel by pixel. You can't achieve that level of precision with traditional collage, no matter how steady your hand.

Examples of digital collage exist all over the Internet, as well as in many print literary/art magazines and journals. Visit the POD Lexis gallery website at http://www.podgallery.com/index.cfm/hurl/msgId=102/action=subcats for a broad scope of digital collages. The site features work from six different artists. Ergocise (http://ergocise.com/tc/dpc.html) exhibits the work of an artist who calls himself Tommy. Digicollage (http://digicollage.com/) displays all sorts of digital collages according to categories, like people and movies. Simply Googling "digital collage" will pull millions of results for your reference and inspiration.

For step-by-step instructions for creating your own digital collage, download this Word document written by staff at London's University of Cumbria (formerly St. Martin's College): http://www.staff.ucsm.ac.uk/droberts/aos4art/downloadable_files/Digital_Collage.doc

For more advanced instructions, check out this bibliography (all books are available through Amazon.com):

Digital Art Studio: Techniques for Combining Inkjet Printing with Traditional Art Materials by Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause, and Bonny Pierce Lhotka

Digital Collage and Painting: Using Photoshop and Painter to Create Fine Art by Susan Ruddick Bloom

Foundation: Transforming Found Objects into Digital Assemblage by Spencer Drate

Mixed-Media Collage: An Exploration of Contemporary Artists, Methods, and Materials by Holly Harrison

Happy collaging!