An Awesome Collage to Display Kid’s Artwork – And How I Saved $915

In search of a way to display children’s artwork, I decided to recreate a collage that would stand the test of time (it’s true: we still have this displayed 6 years later). If you’re in the mood to crunch numbers (I always am), my piece cost about $35, whereas the original masterpiece that I pinned cost upwards of $950! Pinch me.

A post shared by Emily Fazio at Merrypad (@merrypad) on Jan 25, 2018 at 11:43am PST

My inspiration? This kid’s art collage showcased on Apartment Therapy:

The backstory?

Pete’s been collecting his 5-year old daughter’s artwork for years, adoring everything from scribbles, to her first animal sketches, from finger paintings, to projects created in day care. I’ve encouraged him to keep the best original pieces to look back on (within reason, we don’t have the space to save each coloring book), and in the last year or so, she’s amassed quite a pretty gallery. My parents had saved a lot of the art that my sister and I created growing up, and I always enjoyed looking back through it and seeing my skills progress with age. I figured that in the future they’d both would both appreciate having some of her work, regardless of its significance at the time.

The materials and investment:

• 20-3/4″x28-5/8″ IKEA Ribba Frame, White, $19.99 (I actually already owned this one, it’s the one I repaired recently)
• 1 standard uncut mat board, white, $4 (I purchased mine with a 50% off coupon)
• Mat cutter (already owned, learning process detailed here)
• Color printouts (I had to have mine output at The UPS Store, boo, $7)
• Scissors
• Tape

The original artist, interior designer Jan Eleni, charges $950 for a quality 40-piece collage of her client’s children’s art,. Yes, they’re lovely pieces, and I’m sure they’re mounted in something nicer than an IKEA frame, but I wanted one. One with a price tag lower than my monthly living expenses.

Unlike Jan, I decided that I wanted frame this art in a matted print form. So, rather instead of trimming art to size and taping it directly onto a piece of paper behind glass, I’d need to create a photo mat for them to be cleanly presented with. The questionable part was whether I’d be able to actually make a mat with spaces for multiple pieces of art, and if I was able to, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it well.

I started by cutting the newly purchased 36″x48″ mat board to size so that it would fit into the IKEA frame I planned on using. Then, making a whole evening of it while watching Julie & Julia for the first time ever (Note: I didn’t even know it was about a blogger), I carefully calculated and began to sketch where the openings would be on the back of the mat.

There were several things I considered as I planned:

• I wanted a 2″ solid frame all the way around the perimeter of the mat.
• I wanted each thumbnail opening to be even in size.
• I wanted the horizontal and vertical spacing between each thumbnail to be an even width.
• The exact dimensions of each thumbnail weren’t important, as long as they were all landscape in orientation, and evenly spaced.
• I really didn’t want this to look like the matted collages with lots of ovals that everyone bought in the 70’s, my big goal was to make it look streamlined and modern.

I started by marking a 2″ border on the edge of the mat:

And then I got math-y. First, I decided how wide I wanted each line between the thumbnails to be. (How about a 1/2″? Sounds great.). I then considered about how many thumbnails I should try and fit across horizontally and vertically (4-5 across? 8-10 up and down?).

Factoring in the size of the mat, the 2″ border, and 1/2″ spacers, I calculated how much space would be available for each thumbnail. Happily, I landed on nice round-ish numbers, determining that each opening should be 2.5″ x 3.75″. I marked each line that I’d need to cut along on the back of the piece of paper, using the mat cutter as a long straight edge (if not for it, I’d probably have used the drywalling T-square, because it’s been handy as a straight edge in the past).

If you read all of that, maybe you think it sounds easy to create a custom grid on your one and only piece of mat stock, but real life there was a lot of measuring, calculating, mis-measuring, re-calculating, measuring. That’s why the back of the mat looked like this even before it was cut.

Anyways, measure 15 times, cut once, and it seemed like it was going to work out.

Of course, there were two minor 2 issues, both due to my own carelessness:

1) I forgot to rotate the paper as I cut it in the mat cutter, so half of the beveled edges of the mat angle the wrong direction. Slaps head.

2) An unknown substance was on the coffee table where I was cutting. Maybe a yogurt-covered spoon. Because of that carelessness, I do have a dumb little oily stain on the clean side of the mat. The other side of the mat was too marked up with pencil to be of any help. You can’t really see it in the end result with it framed behind glass, but still. Seriously, Emily, get your yogurt-loving act together.

Those issues aside, I was really happy in how it turned out, so I began selecting my 32 pieces of artwork, scanning them one-by-one, and rotating and cropping (if necessary) to fit into a horizontal layout. Of course, I was still considering turning the mat horizontal and using 32 vertical pieces of art, but there didn’t seem to be as many of those once I started poking through Pete’s art stash.

I resized each scanned piece to be around 3.75-4″ wide, focusing on how a proportionate resize effected the height of the image (they needed to stay over 2.5″ tall), and then formatted the whole set, 4-up onto 8.5″ x 11″ pages of a word document. It pains me a lot (a lot, a lot) to admit that I had to take my word document to The UPS Store to have it printed in color; we only have a black and white printer, and I couldn’t exactly print it at work anymore (not that anyone does that).

Thankfully, UPS had a great printer and sold me 8 pages for about $7, which I stomached because it’s only the cost of 1.5 venti mochas, make the mental note to deny myself the treat of a mocha for the next 1.5 times it crossed my mind (I probably buy one a week, not that it’s significant as it relates to this project or my health). OK, back to the art.

I trimmed each piece of printed art with a liberal border, and took care in taping every image into one of the open thumbnails on the freshly cut mat. I found it easiest to angle on the windowsill to let some light shine through the paper, just to see how much allowance I had with spacing and to make sure I wasn’t accidentally cropping out the grass or stick figure hair.

All said and done, I placed the mat and art into my IKEA frame, and stood back, pleased.

Pretty. What a perfect little way to make your kid proud. This one will live in the guest room, the room Julia has claimed as her own with a mountain of stuffed animals.

Side note: The Bat and The Nightmare Before Christmas were custom requests, not drawn by a 5-year old. Pete often freehand sketches special pieces for her to color. Now accepting inquiries from coloring book publishers.