ELI5: What Is Collage?

A collage is a piece of art you make by sticking together lots of different everyday things, like paper scraps, photos, and ribbons, onto a flat surface to create a brand new picture.

Think of it like making a giant puzzle, but you get to invent the pieces yourself. Instead of drawing a tree with crayons, you might cut out a picture of green grass from a magazine for the leaves, use a real piece of brown cardboard for the trunk, and glue a shiny candy wrapper in the sky to be the sun.

You see collage all around you in everyday life:

• Vision boards: When people cut out pictures of their dream pets, favorite foods, and vacation spots from old magazines and glue them on a poster to show what they want in the future.
• Family scrapbooks: When you save movie tickets, birthday cards, dried flowers, and photos, and glue them into a memory book.
• School projects: When you make a poster about space by gluing tin foil stars, newspaper words, and paper planets onto a piece of cardboard.
• Decorating your room: Taping your favorite stickers, postcards, and drawings together on your bedroom wall or locker door.