Choosing Background Fabric for Collage

In this blog post I want to talk to about choosing background fabrics for your collage. I have finished my bison. You can see a part of him under the other fabrics. He is made from all warm colors such as pink, orange, brown, and yellow.

When I started looking for background fabrics, I knew I want him to look a little bit like he's in a field with the sky behind him. However, I don't want it to be too matchy matchy and I don't want it to be like a very straight line of a horizon.

Since the main image is is all warm tones, I'm going to focus on cool tones for my backgrounds, which will mostly be green, blue, and purple.

Now, if I decide to use some warmer colors in the background, such as the strip on the left, I want to make sure that that they do not come in contact with the bison so that his image pops. If I put a yellow right behind him, you won't really see the yellow lines of the bison. 

I do have some motifs already chosen, that are large pink flowers. When I add them, I'll make sure they are not close to the bison. So just because you have colors in your main image doesn't mean you can't have those colors in your background. You just don't want them next to each other because that could cause your main image to blend into your background and you want it to pop.

You can see in the image that I've just of loosely laid out my fabrics around the bison. This is just a starting point and may not be how it's going to end up looking when I'm done and itt gives me an idea of how my thought process is going to work. 

The fabric on the bottom right corner on it with the flowers in it stands out a lot amongst the greens with all the bright flowers. What I will do is put a part of the fabric in the corner of the to be a background, but then I'm also going to cut some of the little flowers out individually and sprinkle them around the other green piecces so it will of pull the bright colors across the collage. 

Hopefully by sharing this process you get a better idea of how to choose background fabrics that will really make your main image pop. Choosing contrasting colors is the best place to start. Warm colors are my main image and cool colors are my background. Then I will build and play and  make it a lot more cohesive than this crazy scrapbook looking thing that I've got going on here. 

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments below. Have fun choosing your fabrics and go make something beautiful.

Prefer a video? I talk more about my fabric choices for this project in this video: