In art making, like in decorating, there are a number of advantages to limiting your choices. Too many options leads to project paralysis. One way to prevent your project from stalling out before it’s even begun is to use a limited color palette.

Over the summer I wanted to play around with collage by making a series of small art pieces and cards. That was the goal: make some mini collages. That’s pretty open-ended and I could have gone in a million directions; my brain was just waiting for the signal to go on an idea rampage. So I drew some boundaries right from the start — every element had to be either black or cream (I could also say natural, off-white, beige, etc. They all fall into the warm-white category which I’m broadly categorizing as “cream”), and I had to only use items I already had. This palette works well with the vintage papers and fabrics I like; I had plenty of materials on hand to choose from.

I had some small black frames that I picked up on clearance, at Michaels I think, a while ago. They had tiny prints of wine glasses glued to a plastic backing which I ended up discarding. I made a new substrate covered in vintage sheet music and simply glued the frame to it.

Once I decided on the composition of each piece, I assembled the collages using gel medium and in the case of the buttons, a needle and thread. To help me remember the order for each element, I laid them out at the top of my work space. I smoothed the layers with a silicone brayer and wiped away excess medium with a small, dampened sea sponge.

Here are some of the completed cards. For the cards I used a piece of mat board as the collage substrate and it’s possible to remove the board from the card front and display the card on a small easel. They are all similar and yet each has its own little story, a small piece of art in its own right.

A starting point: a Dover clip-art book (circa 1997) featuring “old-fashioned floral bouquets” in black and white. I then pulled out my bin of neutral-colored papers, a bag of lace scraps, another bag of small fabric pieces and my jar of antique black buttons. Shuffling items around, playing with different lay outs — I decided to do a series of cards featuring the black and white botanicals, and three mini collages with buttons as focal points.