Displaying Christmas cards seems as natural as putting up a Christmas tree in many households. What do people do with the cards after the holiday season is over, though? Rather than throwing these cards away, why not create some art from them?
Collages created from Christmas cards can be constructed in art journals, in altered books, on construction paper, on poster board, on canvases, or any other surface the artist feels most comfortable working on. Because collages are such a freestyle form of art, there are no real rules for how or what they’re created from or on.
For this tutorial, consider book arts as the surface to work upon. This can occur in an altered book, a notebook, an art journal, or a memory book.
Materials:
- Watercolor paint
- Paintbrushes
- Christmas cards
- Glue sticks
- Scissors
- Art journal, or other book intended to be worked in
- Scrapbook materials
- Decorative paper
- Black fine-tipped sharpie
- Small containers of water
Instructions:
- Create a color wash over the page the collage is being created on. If both sides of the page spread is going to be collaged over, be sure to paint both sides. Allow the paint to dry completely before moving on to the next step. Drying time can be speeded up through use of a heat gun or hair dryer.
- While the pages are drying, cut up the Christmas cards. Find interesting text, pictures that are appealing, textures that are interesting, and so on. Don’t discard the scraps because they can be used on a future project (like what’s explained in Don’t Throw That Away!).
- Sort through the scrapbook materials, and see how they’ll fit with the collage project in mind. Start placing things randomly on the pages without gluing them down, and then rearrange these elements until the desired plan has been achieved.
- Glue all the elements down using the glue stick. If the glues stick doesn’t hold well enough, then consider using white craft glue or a hot glue gun.
- After all the elements have been glued down securely, allow the pages to dry completely before moving on. Once everything has dried completely, take out the black fine-tipped sharpie and write over the collage. These can be random thoughts, quotations, lists, song lyrics, bold words, or whatever works best for the theme of this collage.
Variations:
- Add magazine clippings in with this collage.
- Consider using altered photographs that didn’t develop right or that are not desirable enough to be framed or go into a photo album.
- Use white acrylic paint to further embellish dark areas of the collage with text or doodles.
- Tear up the greeting cards with a deckled edge, rather then creating clean cuts with scissors, and rub the edges with distress inks.
If the greeting card collection is too large to work on one collage, encourage others to work on this project as well. Another option to consider is to add the leftover Christmas cards to an ephemera collection for future projects.
