Collage

Cut paper, photographs and scraps sit on top of the image as flat pieces. The frame becomes a surface somebody has stuck things to.

Torn edges carry the meaning. A clean cut reads as design and a rough tear reads as urgency, which is why ransom notes and punk record sleeves look the way they do.

Every piece is flat and sits at its own depth in a stack, with hard edges and small drop shadows where one overlaps the next. Nothing bends around anything.

Scale mismatch is the language. A magazine eye four times the size of the head it lands on, a printed hand from a different picture entirely. Matching the scales would remove the point.

Paper stock shows. Newsprint greys and shows its screen dots. Glossy magazine paper holds colour and catches a highlight along the tear. Naming the stock changes the whole look.

Use it for title sequences, for a character's obsession pinned to a wall, and for any piece with a zine or punk register.

Skip it when the frame has to hold together as one image. Collage works by breaking the picture into pieces.

A double exposure blends two images into each other with soft transparent overlap. Collage keeps every piece opaque with a hard edge, so each fragment hides what is under it.

The test is the edge. Soft and see-through is a double exposure. Hard and torn, with a shadow under the lip, is collage.

Terry Gilliam built his cutout animations from magazine engravings and photographs, moving them as flat hinged pieces, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) carries that style through its linking sequences.

The pieces come back softly blended into the image, which is a double exposure with extra steps. Ask for hard torn edges, as the note says, and for a small shadow under each piece.

The other failure is a tidy grid of same-sized rectangles. Say the scales are mixed and the pieces overlap at angles.