Emerging with Grace: DIY: Dorm Collage Art

A few summers ago, my older sister Kayla and her best friend from high school, Melanie, were both single and bored. They hung out every weekend, got Rita's, sat around my house flipping through magazines, etc. And one day on a Wal-Mart trip they picked up cheap, basic, glass frames with the intention of cutting snippets out of the magazines they had been paging through and making collages... It was like scrapbooking a large sheet of paper and then hanging it on the wall...

Well, I loved the idea and decided to do it myself - only mine were a little different. I didn't cut out images of flowers or letters. Instead, I cut out the edges of the advertisements from my Teen Vogue's- so I had a ton of little scraps of color. I made one that summer with Kay and Mel, and then two this past summer to hang in my dorm room. Dorm rooms are so blah, white, stark, and boring - so you bring in your colorful towels, colorful bedding, hang up pictures and posters, etc. But I love the way that these collages bring color to the room in addition to displaying favorite photos. They are like instant wall art... Here's the process:

Step #1: Cut out images, advertisements, letters, etc. from old magazines

Step #2: Lay out all of your clippings and arrange them. I usually lay them out by color and then can see how many I have in each color family...

Step #3: Choose clippings, arrange them on the template of the frame. The frames I got from Wal-Mart came with a sheet inside that had the dimensions on them and the company's name - I arranged everything on top of that and then glued it right on...

Step #4: Choose pictures, arrange them on top of the collage, and back them with paper if you'd like

Step #5: Once everything is intact, put the frame back together and WA-LAH! Instant photo collage/ wall art!! This is super cheap (I think the frames are between $5-$10), is really fun, and is GREEN in a way - you're re-using your old magazines :)

Here are two of mine...

I used all blue, green, and tan snippets for this one... I got a lot of beach clippings from summer magazine advertisements... And this collage is all pictures from OCNJ and a weekend away in the Catskill Mountains of New York from last summer.

This collage has a lot of clippings from the pink, purple, red, orange side of the color wheel. I also backed these three pictures in different colored paper to help them jump off of the collage. This one contains three pictures from Freshman Year... A girls weekend at the Delaware shore, a trip to Lancaster to stay with my one roommate Rachel, and a shot of Mark and I at the Camden Aquarium where our school had our Spring Formal...

And here is my desk at school... quite clean because I had just moved in and organized all my stuff... but believe me - it didn't always look like this :) The first collage I made is hanging on the wall to the right of my desk - I got better the second time around and so that one is on a shelf in my closet right now...