How to Make a Paper Mosaic Greeting Card

Church of Craft is tomorrow, and waaaay back in August, I decided we’d be making Paper Mosaic Greetings Cards at this meeting.

It took me a while, though, to figure out a good approach to paper mosaic. Church of Craft projects need to be accessible to people of all levels of crafty skill, and while paper mosaic is certainly simple to do, the design process can be challenging.

But, yesterday I hit upon the solution: templates! I’m pretty happy with this approach, and thought I’d share . . . .

So first, you get a blank greeting card and several coordinating pieces of paper. I’m using scrapbook paper here, but you could use old wrapping paper, greeting cards, or even junk mail.

This is the template sheet I cooked up for the meeting — lots of basic shapes, which can be interpreted lots of ways in paper mosaic.

I used one of these templates to cut the same shape out of all three papers.

Then, stack all three shapes up together, matching all edges.

Cut through all three layers at once. Because this is a triangle, I started by cutting off the tip.

From there, I kept cutting strips, and then cutting each strip into squarish paper “tiles.” Again, I’m cutting through all three layers of paper at once. And as I’m working, I’m arranging the resulting piles of tiles in roughly the original shape, so they’ll be easy to re-assemble into a mosaic.

And don’t worry about cutting perfect squares — part of the charm of mosaic is its slightly irregular nature.

When you’re all done cutting, you’ll have something that looks sort of like this.

Now, it’s time to re-assemble the shape on your greeting card (but no glue just yet.) Choose one color or another from your little piles of papers, and put them back together into the original shape. Because you cut all those paper tiles out together, they’ll re-assemble nicely. And be sure to leave a sliver of space between each tile, the way you would in a tile mosaic.

Every now and again, you might need to trim a tile so it better fits into the design. Go right ahead!

Continue placing your tiles until you’ve re-assembled the original shape. And look at this — you still have enough tiles leftover to make two more cards!

Now it’s time for glue. I like glue stick for attaching my tiles to the card — especially if I’m making mosaic with thinner paper. However, your hands will get gluey as you work, so keep a handy-wipe nearby so you can clean your fingers often.

Done! And I added an extra tile to simulate a tree trunk.

You can brush some Mod Podge over your work to seal it, if you like, or apply a sheet of clear contact paper over the card. But if you’ve glued the tiles securely, then you don’t need this step.

Here are a couple other mosaics I made — see, your tiles don’t even need to be square!

Tagged as: greeting card, holiday, paper, tutorial