How To Create A Collage

A collage is a collection of photos of your characters, pets, setting, furniture, inspiring objects, places, clothes, landscape, vehicles or whatever you might need to help you with a visual or to trigger ideas. Collages can be a source of creative inspiration or simply used as added information when you fill in your character sheet for your publisher.

I create collages for all of my WIPs in the prewriting stage. Since this can be a great time-stealer, I tend to hunt out my heroes and heroines, then any photos I need and can find quickly. Otherwise, I add as I go along, but only if I feel the need. Some of my collages have only a few photos and some have every available space filled. To me, the most important thing is to get the right hero and heroine for the job!

So how do I go about doing this?

1. Google appropriate photos (I’d either hunt out actors and actresses or check out fotosearch.com for my photos)

2. Open Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

3. Add book title and tag line. (This is not compulsory; you don’t have to do this if you don’t wish to)

4. Add photos I’ve collected. (Do this by either clicking on Insert Picture, which will take you to your computer User pictures or wherever you’ve saved the photos you’ve collected, or you can copy and paste onto the PowerPoint slide)

5. When you’ve arranged the photos to your liking (I prefer a higgledy-piggledy arrangement, but I know some author friends who can boggle my mind with their fantastic ability to create straight-lined arrangements—you decide what works best for you) select them all by moving the cursor to one of the slide’s corners. Now click and hold down the left button on your mouse and drag the highlight square to form a box over the entire slide. Right click and select Group. This stops the photos from accidentally being moved.

6. Now for the good bit. Save your slide as a JPEG, this will allow you to upload the image to websites/groups or wherever you wish to put them on the Internet.

7. The next thing I do is print it off and blu-tak it to the wall in my study so I can see it. I also make it my desktop background.


That’s it, folks! How to create a collage in just a few steps. Let me know how you got on, won’t you?