Collage exploration #2

Series: Collage exploration #2

This one was going to have a butterfly on it. The first thing that caught my eye was a scrap of paper that had the outline of a butterfly where one had been die-cut for another project, and I thought that could make an interesting negative space element. But as I was finding and arranging other papers to fill out the rest of the collage, those parts of the design grew away from the butterfly and I put it to one side. I try not to be afraid to change direction; my initial thought wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t right for that day.

So I found some interesting nature images instead and created a fan of blues and greens. I loved the orange in the first of these collages and still had some scraps lying around that I used to punch the small contrasting circles from — I had to glue the magazine paper to some thin card first, my punch wouldn’t cut the thin paper cleanly otherwise.

The orange butterfly strip was from a piece of pre-embossed resist patterned paper leftover from something, though I can’t work out what exactly. I carefully cut the triangle to echo the angles of the highlights on the background piece with the tree branches. Then I finished it off by adding the line of orange dots perpendicular to the direction of the butterfly triangle.