Are you looking for inspiration and ideas for your junk journal, mixed media book or art journal? Printable Art Collage sheets can serve as visual art prompts to help get you started or boosted, ready for creative play, even when you don’t have much time.
When making art in my creative journal, I enjoy the process of working through specific thoughts and feelings head-on, as they arise.
I have won half of the battle If I prevent dwelling or carrying the feelings around with me. Allowing them to take up valuable occupancy in my head just adds a heavy weight on my shoulders.
My personal process of working through difficult things, happy thoughts and reminders of gratitude has become something I look forward to.
Art Journaling helps all the feels, but it's gotta be easy and FUN, or I just won't do it!
10 Benefits of Using Printable Collage Sheets
There are no limits when it comes to making art in your art journal, it is your judgement free zone to explore all of the creativity tools and supplies at your disposal, but, there are some advantages to using printable images to finish off your work, let's go over some of them.
1. Cutting out Collage sheets in advance Saves Time!
I had to find a way to make myself more time when I actually wanted to be away from my computer. Having images already printed, cut out and ready to journal with the art is a sweet time saver.
How can time fly so quickly when fun is involved? It's not fair!
Since the whole point of art journaling is to have creative play without boundaries and to express inner thoughts without pressure, getting lost in the details of drawing each image or hand-lettering phrases could take away from that objective–It does for me, anyway.
It's a struggle not getting caught up in small details. If I focus to much on the details, I get nothing done and before I know it, creative time is up.
I hope you will find printing out and fussy cutting Clip Art a great time saver like it is for me, since I cut away while watching TV with my family–almost cut my fingers off a few times in the dark–but when it's time to make the messy art in my art journal and process those feelings and ideas, it's ready to go.
2. Collage Sheets are easy to use
With art journaling, you will have an opportunity to use mixed media on a small scale and try out how the various mediums work together without any pressure.
In my opinion, most of the fun happens in making the backgrounds making the images work with the background you painted and the thought or feeling you are trying to express on the page.
3. You don't have to focus on learning to draw
I once read on a message board that using someone else's art in your art journal is kind of like cheating.
Do you agree? goodness, I definitely don't!
Does the quilt artist make all of the fabric to create their quilted masterpieces?
Most of the time, not, they too build on the work of other artists, pattern artists who spend a lifetime making art and sometimes the artists only make the art sending it over to a skilled pattern maker, they build upon each other's expertise.
The truth is…. “Teamwork makes the dream work”. learning to draw takes a lot of time, while it is worthwhile to learn to draw, sometimes you just NEED to make art without the pressure!
4. Less Pressure
Three cheers for feeling SO much more relaxed! When I use printed images, I feel less pressure to make it perfect. That's a giant benefit of using art downloads.
Imagine if the page in your art journal doesn’t turn out the way you want and realizing that you can print the same images out, a second time to give it another go, learning from a previous experience or just trying new techniques.
Using printable collage sheets gives you that option to print more than one copy of the same set of collage images without having to have the forethought to do things like, scan cut-out magazine images and create digital copies before you glue them down the originals permanently.
5. Cut-Outs Can be a Low mess activity
You don't have to choose one method over the other… You really can use whatever you have, If you have limited supplies, collage is an ideal way to get started if you have limited supplies, all you need is a printer, paper, glue, scissors & some kind of colouring tools.
Using printable art images saves me time for two reasons….
- First: Cutting an image vs drawing it yourself can be a huge time saver, especially if you are not a skilled artist. Not to mention, you don’t even have to go out to a store when you feel like getting new supplies or ordering online and waiting for your purchases to be shipped out. Just download, print and get to cutting.
- Second: Making sure I have a good selection of artwork to choose from makes my creative process flow. You don't really need a solid plan before you get started on your art, just an idea of what is weighing heavy on your mind at the moment, focusing on what you would like to express.
6. You Can Print On The Paper you want
Printing on different paper media adds to the fun & flexibility my printables. Not only can I play with the scale of your images, I don't have to be limited to just copy paper or the type of paper images I would have to purchase at the craft store.
Printable designs like Collage sheets, printable pattern designs or clipart images can be printed out on clear sticker paper, waterslide paper, image transfer paper, white sticker paper, heavy weight card stock, watercolor paper, tissue paper, old book paper.
Get to it, experiment by printing downloaded images out on any paper media you can run through your home printer. Most of the fun of paper crafting is in the experimentation and discoveries how the supplies work together.
If you feel like you need it, I have some extra tips about printing in my FAQ.
7. Collecting and Sorting Images is Fun
There is something satisfying about having a collection of beautiful images to choose to collage with when you are ready to make your art collages.
As a collection lover, I can find myself spending way too much time on the collecting and not enough DOING and making because adding to my collection is so satisfying. So, do be careful to not let the collecting of images become the only thing you do–unless it makes you happy and if it does, then who cares!
Once you find a favorite source for printable art, other than Inspirational Zest of course! It can be used alongside traditional ephemera or substituted entirely. If you don't have time or patience to collect old magazines or books before starting your journal, printables may be your jam!
8. reduce PLASTIC PACKAGING WASTE
Often art supplies like die cuts will have extra plastic packaging and bags that just have to be thrown in the garbage. With printables, you can print only what you need or use images you already have
9. resize to whatever size you need
Using the settings on your printer or within adobe acrobat software, you can choose to resize the printable to suit the size of art journal that you work in.
10. They are Affordable!
While there is a drawback to printable collage sheets in the fact that you must have a printer to print them out, being able to print a page of art images for your out on demand as many times as you want, on whatever type of paper you want can also make them an affordable way to use your art journaling supplies.
GET THE FREE COLLAGE SHEETS!
