Objective: Learn some guiding principles that will help you to arrange multiple images into collage type frames in a way that flows and is easy on the eye.

At the studio we create a lot of framed pieces using multiple images. We call them storyboard frames because they do just that, they tell a story. Many of the retail frame shops and home decor places sell ready made frames with mats that have multiple openings. This can be a great way to show off some of your shots of your family. The keys to pulling off a great looking storyboard frame are using coordinating images and arranging them so that they flow and keep the viewers eye inside the frame.

To illustrate this, I grabbed my four favorite images from a session last week with Mia. In selecting my 4, I knew that I needed all 4 to coordinate so I chose them all with the same dress and I chose 2 standing and 2 leaning in on a little pink ottoman. This would not have worked as well with 3 standing and 1 ottoman or vice versa. They needed to all be one thing or 2 and 2. Here is the layout arranged in a way that I think works best.

* When laying out an arrangement like the one in this post (2 pink ottomans and 2 without), I like the matching images to be diagonal from each other if at all possible. If you do them side by side it splits the composition in half visually. This can be seen in the next grouping below.

* I also like all of the eyes to be looking IN to the center of the arrangement and not out to the sides. In the group below, she is looking OUT of the frame in the lower left.

In this next group, we have repositioned the similar images diagonal from each other, which helps a lot, BUT we we still have her looking out to the upper left. The way my eye travels here is that I start at the top left and have to really push my eye to move to the top right and then easily down to the bottom right and then to the bottom left and back up to the top left where my eye wants to follow her glance off to the left and out instead of back around, which would be preferable. I like to keep the viewers eye moving in an easy circle through a 4-up like this. In triptychs (a 3 image layout), I like the center to feel nestled in between two images that keep the viewer's eye inside. I always imagine the 1st and 3rd image in a triptych to be like a pair of parenthesis.

Another thing to consider is the size of the faces in relation to each other. As I was cropping the images for this arrangement, I tried to get her head to be the approximately the same size in all of them. It can work if the heads are not all the same size but it goes along with what I said in the beginning, if only one is bigger it will look out of place or kind of like "one of these things is not like the other" (you have to sing that when you read it). If two heads were slightly bigger or smaller but matched that could work (like the pink ottomans). Here is the same grouping as above but with one head bigger.

Okay, now it's your turn...gather up three or four like images and see how they work together. I'd love to see some of your experiments. Please post links to them here in the comments section.