Collage Day #26: What Do You Do with a Mistake?

What do you do when you make a mistake? What if your whole final result looks like a mistake?

You could just get rid of it, throw it out of your sight and your life.

But you might be missing an opportunity. To experiment. To learn. To create something better out of something flawed and disappointing.

I didn’t like this collage I made. At. All.

Everything in it just seemed to compete. There was no focal point, no effective contrast or flowing pattern. It just looked bleh to me.

I wanted to throw it out.

But I decided to fool around with it, take it apart, find other ways to use the parts–maybe in a different way with different elements.

The glue wasn’t stuck so badly that I couldn’t remove the red, clashing segments. With that clashing gone, I was able to mess around with what was left, and create a better composition. And harmony.

Notice how your eye follows the lines up to the daffodils in the “near” corner. Better composition. I felt a lot better with that. And now the pallet consists of greens and yellows and beiges, and neutral black (and a little white) give the contrast. Much more serene.

Now what about the red pattern? I thought it would look much better on a background echoing some of the blues veined through it.

I found some in my junk mail stash. I especially liked the misty quality one page had when coupled with the red. But I didn’t have enough red to make a complete collage.

I was sure I had more of it somewhere. I remembered it was from a full-page ad for Turning Leaf wine, and was sure I’d kept what I hadn’t used.

Sure enough, there it was, in one of my file folders.