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Photo collage shapes, and how much of the paper each one covers
Photo collage shapes, in the sense this page means it, are the three plain symbols sold here: a heart, a ring and a five-pointed star. Everything else cut to an outline - the dogs, the people, the letters and the digits - is a picture of something, and each of those has a page of its own. These three are pictures of nothing, which is exactly what makes them interchangeable in a way the others are not. Any photographs at all suit them, none of them brings a subject with it, and so the choice comes down to what the shape says and how much of the paper it covers. That second thing decides how large your photographs print and it is not visible in a thumbnail. Measured against the square each one sits in, the ring covers about two-thirds, the heart about three-fifths and the star barely more than a third - so the same number of pictures comes out markedly smaller inside a star than inside a heart on identical paper. All three hold their outline at any count, which leaves scale as the only axis you are really choosing on.
What is on this page
- Heart photo collage
- A heart photo collage, cut to a heart outline and filled entirely with your own photographs, anywhere from the minimum on its page to several hundred.
- Circle photo collage
- A circle photo collage, arranged as a ring with the centre left as bare paper rather than as a filled disc.
- Star photo collage
- A star photo collage, cut to a five-pointed star and filled with your own photographs, with all five points as sharp at the lowest count as at the highest.
Questions
I have a fixed set of photographs. Which of the three suits them best?
The heart or the ring, and for the same reason: they leave the most room. On a two-foot square sheet at fifty-five photographs, a heart prints its pictures around two inches across and a ring a shade under one and nine-tenths, where a star manages under an inch and a half. That is a third off the width for no change in the number of photographs, and it is the difference between faces you can pick out from the sofa and faces you have to walk up to. If the pictures matter individually - a year of a child, people who will come close and look - start with the heart. If they are a mass and the shape is the point, the star is no worse for the purpose.
Does any of them stop reading if I use too few photographs?
No, and this is the one thing people most often assume wrongly about shaped collages. The photographs are masked to the outline rather than stacked inside it, so the shape is drawn by the silhouette: the star has five sharp points at its floor of nine pictures exactly as it does at two hundred and fifty, and the heart comes to a proper tip at its own floor of twenty. Rendered at the bottom, middle and top of the range and measured, the inked area moves by under five per cent. The floor exists because below it the layout starts discarding cells it cannot fit and one of them shows as a white bite out of the edge, not because any of these three stops looking like itself. It is measured on each outline, so a star and a heart do not carry the same one.
Will my photographs all come out the same size?
Near enough in all three, and closer to each other than the shapes suggest. The ring is the one with a band of even thickness, so it looks like the one that should divide most evenly - and measured across every count from twenty to two hundred and fifty it is the least even of the three. Its smallest tenth of pictures averages nine-tenths of its typical one, the heart a shade over nine-tenths, and the star nearly nineteen-twentieths. All three pinch somewhere - the heart at its tip, the star along its five points - and the ring is no exception for all its even band. None of that is a defect; it is what gives a shaped collage its edge. It is worth knowing if you have a handful of photographs you want shown properly rather than used as texture.
How are these different from the dog and the people shapes?
In what they ask of the photographs rather than in how they are made. A dog or a figure is a picture of something, so it sets an expectation - a collage cut to a German Shepherd wants to be mostly that dog. These three carry no subject, so a heart full of four generations, a wedding and a holiday reads correctly, where the same mixture inside an animal does not. If you came here wanting an outline of a creature or a person, the dog and people pages are the ones to read; this page is for the case where the shape is a sentiment rather than a likeness.
Do they all print square?
Yes, all three, which is not true of the figures. The ring is exactly square, the star very slightly wider than tall and the heart a little wider again, and all three are close enough that a square sheet wastes almost nothing on them. That makes them the easiest things here to frame, since square frames and square mats are sold everywhere and nothing has to be ordered to measure. The size table on each page is generated for that outline, so the proportion is already settled before you choose a size.
What arrives, and can I change the words?
A Canva template with the shape already built and every cell positioned, opening in a free Canva account. You add the photographs, keep or delete the two lines of text underneath, and export at whatever size you are printing. Nothing is printed or posted by us. The words are ordinary Canva text - typeface, size and position all yours - and a fair number of people take them off entirely, which these three carry better than most, the shape being the whole message.