Collage Mat Idea

Once upon a time, my mom & I took a great girls trip to Vegas. One of the places on our little get away we got a caricature made. It was a odd size and drawn to the very edge, but a GREAT memory! My mom kept it, but never knew what to do with it, so before she got a chance to hang it I snuck it away an got down to work.

I was lucky, I took tons of pictures and every where had free tourist magazines (being a scrapbooker I snatched everyone up with plans of future pages), but you can do this with any items relating, even just a color scheme. If you want grab some scrapbook stickers for a extra touch do it, I did. What else you need it: scissors, photo-safe glue stick, 4 scrapbook photo corners, acid free poster board and frame of choice.

*Just for example, I'm demonstrating on a much smaller scale.

Cut down your poster board to the size of frame specifics, I believe this was a 16x20 and my image was a 14x18, so it gave me 2 inches around to decorate.

Get out your magazines, scrap paper and photos. Time to get to cutting!

Yes, that's a Ikea Catalog, but it works. Also, my photo washed out the color, but it was more blue.

When considering the background you want your base to be full of color, though it shouldn't show, this just makes a good base for if part does show. Make sure the whole poster board has solid pages of great colors glued to it.

Now comes the fun part! Better to have too many then not enough. Pull every image you even are slightly considering to use. I stick to 3 types of cuts. Rounding (kid w/towel), exact (yellow truck) & square (plant an mom w/kid). In the past I used lots of fancy cuts with my scrapbook scissors, but when trying to layer them together those always got left out because the edges would clash too much. Also, since it's a collage you don't want it all uniform.

I like to make piles. Piles by size and by cut style. Work largest images first to smallest. Remember to change up the angles when gluing to make it more interesting. If you are just making a collage fill the whole thing, but if you are using this like my project as a mat, work edge to inward. Square cuts are the easiest around the edge since it needs to fit in a frame, though you can trim extra bits away. 

As you are working the mat, remember you don't need to fill in the whole poster board. I kept my main subject handy an would lay on top every once in awhile so I can get a rough idea if I covered everything or didn't cover parts of the background image that I wanted showing. Once I was happy with my background,

mat I laid the caricature flat and in the middle then attached my scrapbook corners to the collage. I did not add one bit of glue to the main subject, if anything happened it could be easily removed and frame changed. I picked up this frame at Aaron Brothers, check for coupons and for Penny Sale dates.

It's a great statement piece and it really brings back so many memories, much more then just 1 picture alone could ever do, it also made a great surprise gift.