How to make a collage?
A collage (From the French: coller, to glue) is a work of art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. Use of this technique made its dramatic appearance among oil paintings in the early 20th century as an art form of groundbreaking novelty.
An artistic collage work may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or hand-made papers, portions of other artwork, photographs, and such, glued to a piece of paper or canvas.
Cubist painter, Pablo Picasso, was the first to use the collage technique for oil paintings. In 1912 for his Still Life with Chair Caning, he pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-cane design onto the canvas of the piece.
Collage as a theoretical concept has been widely discussed and used after Picasa. Surrealist artists have made extensive use of collage. Collage concept has also been used in architecture, and with wood. The wood collage is a type that emerged somewhat later than paper collage. The concept of collage has also crossed the boundaries of visual arts, and used in Music. For more information, please visit Wikipedia.
Digital Collage
With the development of computer technology, digital collage become popular. You may blend images or photos and create a collage with almost any photo editing software, such as Photoshop, Gimp. It is very easy and flexible to use layers to blend several photos. Here is an introduction of creating a simple collage of 3 photographs named photo1, photo2, photo3.
In Picasa, to creat a collage is very automated. Picasa gives you four collage styles that you can choose in the Type drop down dialog box. These styles are: picuture pile, picture grid, contact sheet and multi exposure. you may click here for more.
You can also find some video tutorials on Youtube website as well.