Creating the collage

creating the collages to begin with with quite overwhelming as i am not a natural sketchbook-er and i wanted the collages to be produced in that type of memorabilia/ scrap book style.

i initially intended to produce the collages on a huge piece of paper adding each illustration as i went on on top of collaged paper.
however, thinking about it, i realised this meant their was no room for error, and this scared me especially if i have spend a long time on one illustration, started on a new one next to it and it goes wrong!
i also don't trust myself with spelling and as i planned to add hand written quotes this would be a problem.

so... i decided to digitally produce the collage. scanning in each illustration, quotes and paper textures.

this was great as i was able to digitally enhance the quality of my illustrations.
and although i had already sketched out the placement of each illustration with quotes and papers before beginning, i was able to move and change their scale if the initial sketch composition wasn't working how i imagined.

however one thing i did find tricky was adding the quotes. it was hard to fathom the length of line to write the quote on which would fit in the place i wanted it  amongst the illustrations in the collage.

after having to rewrite a number of quotes because they wouldn't fit where i wanted them to without overlapping illustrations or overcomplicating a certain area, i discovered i could chop and change the quotes digitally.
i did this by selecting the certain words and moving them to create new lines to my preferred size. though this was also a timely process, it was quicker then writing out the quotes again and again to discover they were not quite right still!

something i also had to get used to was adding the collage paper to create texture, depth and interest amongst my illustrations.
i began my collages thinking i needed to fill as much negative space with more illustrations for it too look like a finished piece, but i discovered adding pieces of paper and tapes did this as it completed the piece but kept focus on the illustrated parts of the collage. it worked well as a framing tool. i had to make sure i found a good balance though and that i used a variety of different papers in different shapes to avoid repetitiveness.
i tried to stick to the same papers throughout all 3 of my collages - making this the constant theme on each as obviously each collage piece would consist of different drawings to communicate the different people.