Learning from example
I'm a firm believer in learning from example. I totally love the idea of copying a style or technique until you learn from it, and your own style emerges. Since we are in the middle of the current postcard swap on "home", I had been looking for some inspiration to get me motivated for creating my own cards. Scrolling through my Instagram, I came across an amazing collage by Jocelyn, who goes by the account name Lillapalmer. Her collage gave me the idea I wanted to recreate.
Here's her amazing Instagram post:
I love the house illustration, together with colored pieces of a single color theme, and neutral background pages. If you can break down the construction of a collage into concepts, then that really helps you to figure out how you can do something similar. To me it looked something like this:
- multiple pieces of neutral colored scraps for the background
- an illustration of a house on white paper
- embellishments in a single color or 2 colors
There are other things, like additional embellishments on white paper, but those aren't important to me. I figured I could add more things if I needed.
My own interpretation
I knew immediately that I could create something similar. I created four cards of my own.
I looked online for some illustrated drawings of houses. Of course, the vintage-style of homes appealed to me most. They printed out great on my black and white printer. All the other paper pieces came out of my stash of vintage papers.
I used some rubber stamping instead of additional paper embellishments. I like that I can choose ink color to tie in my color theme.
The postcards were dressed up a little, with how I staged the photos. A house needs a key to open the front door, right?
In all, I'm pretty happy with these. They were fun to make and came together really fast once I had the idea of what I wanted to create. Using another collage as my example, it was just a matter of assembling all my pieces.
They'll be mailed off to new homes shortly, for the East, west, home is best swap.