Collage art concepts - Anchoring your elements

Sometimes when you creating a collage, it's tempting to leave elements that floating on their own. Here I show you why it looks better if you anchor them.

 

Scenario (picture 1): I have this vibrant pink paint chip. It’s not the easiest color to collage with, but I have the perfect complimentary stamp, as well as a nice vintage image, so these are the pieces I want to work with.

I’ve added some dictionary behind the woman, and I have 3 elements, so can I call this collage finished?

What do you notice about the illustration of the woman? Do you see that her legs are missing? She’s incomplete. Yes, that’s all that was done in the illustration, but instead of having it end abruptly, add a piece at the base to anchor her onto something. After I added the pink polkadots (picture 2), I didn’t like it. The color worked, but I’m not a pink polkadot kind of person. Adding the piece of book page below the pink made things better (picture 3). It also helped that it was the base of the book page with an obvious margin at the bottom. That buffer of space marks the edge of the collage.

But what about the postage stamp? It’s floating in space. There’s nothing to anchor it. I found a piece of handwriting and placed it behind the stamp, but overlapping the dictionary piece (picture 4). The handwriting piece is torn on two sides, but I deliberately made a clean cut with scissors at the corner so that it would copy the straight edge of the paint chip.

Now all that’s left to do is to check for balance. Is there more weight on one side than the other? Considering the rule of thirds, the postage stamp and the woman are positioned just right. It’s all good.

Lastly, I move the entire paint chip onto a new substrate. I’ve got lots of pink in there, so it works great with a piece of pattern paper with pink roses and some sewing patterns in the background.

Takeaway from this lesson:

1. Whenever you have an image that is incomplete, add an element (or two) over the unfinished area. This way you make it seem deliberate and that something is missing wont be so obvious.
2. If a single piece is floating by itself, think about anchoring it to something else, so that it is connected to the rest of your collage.