I love browsing old image archives—and looking for vintage prints in the antique shops!—and always find it really exciting to stumble upon some illustrations that I wouldn't necessarily deliberately look for to use in my work, but which then ignite something within me! This is how the very first collage in the series featuring the bull came about, and more recently, when I got playing around with the reptilians out of my system, I got really fascinated by the fish, crustaceans and insects!

In this project, I am going to share a small selection of my favourite minimalist collages, but if you want to see more, be sure to follow us on Instagram @attitudecreative, where I will be sharing more collages!

 

A final version of the first collage in the series, the original one (which you might have seen a while ago on Instagram) didn't feature a layering effect and the graph was simply placed over the body.

Fun fact: since I used this collage as a demo in my texturing class, I created the layering effect and used a darker colour of the graph to accommodate text placed on the class cover and lesson titles. But because layering elements in different ways is kind of my signature style across all my work, I decided to push this approach further and use it in all of my collages in the series and shared it in the class.

 

I've got a mixed relationship with the red colour (used to be my favourite when I was a teen but over the past 2 decades I stopped liking it much) and cannot say that I ever though that I was particularly into wasps, but when I saw this illustration I though it would be really interesting to try combining it with some triangular geometric drawing which plays off the rhomboid shape of the insect. The is the most simple collage I have created, but it really does not need more than these two elements!

 

I love juxtaposing smooth curves of the snakes with sharp lines and geometric shapes, so these two collages follow my usual approach to composition, but in both I decided to experiment a little more with the colours. Combining dark grey duotone with bright green worked really well for the top collage, but the bottom one I actually recoloured after placing it within the mock-up to make it fit better into the environment.

In this collage I have also experimented a bit more with the typography and mixed together two different inscriptions: the original said "Curves of Temperature" but I though it would be fun to make it into "Curves of Influence" instead.

 

This lobster print might look quite tricky at first bearing in mind how dark it is, but it was remarkably easy to bring out just the right level of detail in the illustration whilst applying the graphic effects. With the lobster being so symmetrical it felt natural to create a symmetrical composition and arrange all of the elements along a single vertical axis.

 

This is probably one of the more playful collages in the series thanks to the circle being used to highlight the eye, but I also love how the diagram works with the fish's body. I'd love to get this collage printed on something like these coasters — never though an image of a fish could make me happy, but it somehow does!:)

 

Thanks for checking out this project!

I'd be super excited to see what animals you pick for your collages and hear about your process too!

—Evgeniya