Beginners Mixed Media: Collaged Backgrounds

For some of us, there is nothing more nerve-wracking than attempting a scrapping style out of your comfort zone or more daunting than a blank canvas with infinite possibilities.
(OK, yes, I’m talking about me personally but I’m sure this applies to others as well!)
So in this blog series, I’m attempting to make Mixed Media less daunting by giving you (and me) some jumping off points. Where to begin with digi – mixed media scrapping? Right here for Mixed Media Beginners!

Hi again! I’ve been working my way through different ideas for incorporating mixed media into my more traditional ‘paper style’ scrapbook pages, and this month the Collage Sheet sub-section of the TLP store ‘Art Journaling & Mixed Media’ category caught my eye and has inspired September’s Mixed Media Beginners.

Collage is a process most of us would have experienced way back as children and is a type of ‘scissors and glue’ art technique. It involves sticking various cut-out images or papers together onto another surface to form a larger artwork.

In scrapbooking, the collage technique lends itself well to making relatively flat backgrounds or shapes and forms with selective paper piecing. Having made easy ‘Instant Mixed Media’ pages before with pre-painted papers from the store, I was glad to see some ready-made collage sheets in the store that take away the mental work and anxiety about trying this technique! As someone that can be indecisive about background papers, I grabbed the Wake Up Happy paper pack by Lynn Grieveson and pulled the included collage sheet straight into a Simply Clean no.8 template from Designed by Soco just to start, and it looks like I did so much more than that one single step because the collage paper full of ephemera, inky text and stamps has so much instant impact!

With a photo of my son in an orange helmet, hanging in the treeline, in the middle of a zipline course, I loved the stamped leaves sa well as the orange tones already on the collage sheet, and wanted to add a fun element of someone or something hanging around. I always like adding animals to my pages so after a quick look in the store, I knew the Not Today kit by Just Jaimee that features sloths and has blues that complemented my photo and brought some contrast to the page would be great to mash-up with Lynn Grieveson’s collage sheet, so today’s post is both a Mixed Media Beginners and mash-up kind of page!

So this is everything I’m mashing with today:

And here’s my work in progress so far:

With the large stamped orange flower on the right being so dominant, putting the sloth on the bottom left of the photo and the contrasting foliage on the bottom left balances out the page a bit. Just Jaimee’s kit alpha also gave me a good solid title that can hold it’s own against all the text and darker details on the collage sheet background, even though it is vellum.

Now filling in the paper pieces from the template with a mix of smaller prints and a larger one of seed heads on the left that looked like the treeline of the photo was extended and bringing in more blues and greens, here’s where I’m at.

So the good thing about the pre-made collage paper is it’s a huge timesaver. It would have taken indecisive me ages to pick and place all those pieces to make the background and make it look cohesive, but maybe if you use a paper like this, there’s a few sections that end up being distracting or not to your taste. Not a problem! The obvious solution is to cover up anything you don’t want showing, either with your photo placement, a label, another piece of paper either cut exactly to fit the whole section or just little shapes like this template has on the right; or the first way that you probably thought of, with the (in the real world) wet kinds of mixed media like paint.

Using a fairly thick gesso element from Just Jaimee’s kit gave me a way to hide some of the background on this page, creating more of a loose triangle that contains the majority of the page, as well as create a resting place for the eyes in all that busy. I also turned off the bead layer in the template and switched the seedhead paper to a solid blue to calm the page a bit more and to pull focus to the photo area of the page. Here it is all done and thanks to the pre-made collage background, I spent less time scrapping this page than my son spent in the treetops!

Collage sheets have so much possibility and character if you love a busy page or not. You could totally make your own just like any layered paper background but I’m all for taking shortcuts when I can these days!