Just A-Musing

Author/artist, Mary Emma Allen, shared a link about Creating Memory Shadowboxes. It got me to musing about how one art form evolves from another.

I did the series of digital scrapbook layouts above to express my thoughts. In my view, collage and decoupage led to or "begat" scrapbooking which is so popular today. Though the French named them, both collage and decoupage go back much further than their names. Collage comes from the French word "to stick" and decoupage from the French word "to cut".

Since the cut pieces for decoupage are then stuck on, I would say that decoupage is a form of collage. Collage is a much broader term, encompassing any artistic arrangement in which things are stuck in place to be enjoyed over time. "Things" can be anything from pictures to hardware to garbage like discarded food containers.

Collage also includes shadowboxes, which are three-dimensional arrangements of items in a box, sometimes divided into segments. The boxes can be hung on a wall or set on a horizontal surface. When used on the horizontal, a shadowbox can even become a practical item like the top of a coffee table.

Read more fascinating facts about Collage.