Watercolor Montage - Art

Have you ever wanted to create a collage or montage of related subjects as an object 'd art? It is fun and relatively easy to make one using your computer and most associated photo capturing software.

I was reared in the south where magnolia blooms were present in my grandparents' yard for most of the spring and early summer months. Their fragrance holds a fond memory for me. My grandmother used to clip those sweetly aromatic magnolia blossoms in the early morning and put a few in a vase that always stayed on her kitchen window sill.

Mom (my grandmother) has been deceased for over twenty years. In remembrance of her life, I wanted to paint a magnolia blossom and somehow incorporate that image onto a piece of her original, copyrighted sheet music. This montage would be a unique memoriam to her talented life as a musician and strong Christian teacher.

Here are the steps to make your own montage:

obtain your image (in this case, an original watercolor painting of a magnolia) and take a picture of it with digital camera, saving it to your computer in a temporary folder containing pictures

obtain second image (I used a piece of my grandmother's sheet music which I scanned and saved to my computer in a temporary file)

obtain and save third (or more) object in the preceding manner (the back of my montage includes copyrights from 1921, the year some of this music was copyrighted in Canada)

using the picture software on your computer, compose the montage and choose the "collage" feature (most all software has this type editing choice)

...in this case, I blended both images together, creating a soft, ethereal effect.

Here is image #1, which is a digital copy of the original 5" x 7" painting, retrieved and held in a temporary file:

After choosing the "collage" feature on the software, the resulting image (left) was created after incorporating the two pictures together (the digital picture of the painting and the scanned copy of the sheet music) via the tricky software.

Now YOU can make a montage!