Digital Collage Sheet FAQs

What is a Digital Collage Sheet?

It's a 4x6 or 8.5x11-inch digital file (PDF or jpg) with high resolution images on it. Once you purchase your collage sheet you will immediately receive an email with links to your downloads. You can then print out the file again and again on cardstock, photo paper, stickers sheets, and more for personal use or to make items to sell.

What's the Quality Like?
All of my images and collage sheets are 300 dots-per-inch, the perfect resolution for printing. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I can spend a ridiculous amount of time with my camera, scanner and PhotoShop restoring and perfecting each image. This often includes adjusting levels, contrast, brightness, and colors, applying two to three different filters, recreating any damaged or folded areas, cleaning up and removing any unnecessary backgrounds, and selecting the best part of the image to crop for different sized sheets. I can easily spend several hours on one image alone, and most of my sheets contain 30 to 50 separate images from different scans.

What Can I Do With These Sheets? Can I Make Items to Sell?
With your purchase, you receive the right to use these images for your personal crafts or to alter them to sell, for example in cards or jewelry. Basically, you can do almost anything (legal) with the image except actions that compete with my business or make it easy for another person to have the image.

By purchasing this item, you agree not to:

1) Sell or give away the image unaltered, either printed or digitally. Fabric transfers are the only exception that are okay.
2) Use them in collage sheets, image CDs, digital compilations, scrapbooking kits, image downloads, or similar forms that directly compete with piddix.
3) Make the item available in such a way that someone could steal the image. For example, if you would like to put it up on a website, it must be small (200 pixels on the largest side) and/or heavily altered and watermarked.
4) Use the item in mass production. If you would like to use the image more than 100 times, contact me for a separate, relatively inexpensive commercial license.

Where Do You Get Your Images?
I travel across the country with my scanner visiting dozens of archives personally, haunt second-hand shops and estate sales, and have walls and boxes full of cards, books, photographs and ephemera which I own. If you want to know where a specific image is from, please feel free to ask.

How Does The Copyright Thing Work?
I refuse to use an image unless I am 100% confident that it is in the public domain in the U.S. or I personally own the copyright. I write letters to publishing houses and authors (all of which I have on file), pour through old copyright renewal notices, and have a lawyer with whom I consult on a regular basis. A full description of how I determine copyrights is available on my blog.

I retain copyright to the digital collage sheets, but I grant permission with your purchase for you to use them to create your own crafts for personal use or to sell.

What if I Don’t Have a Home Printer? How Do I Print Somewhere Else?
When I print my collage sheets at the local printers (I use Kinkos or Office Depot here) I call them first and ask if I can email or ftp them the files, and what format works best for them. (jpgs are much smaller, so may be better for a slow connection, but PDFs are more "fixed"). You can also copy the files to a disk and bring them over in person as well. For the first time you do it, you may want to be there, or ask them to print the same sheet on a couple types of paper while you figure out your preferences. Once you've figured out how you like your sheets to look, then it's even easier to order them the next time: just send the sheets over, ask them to put them on your preferred paper, and then pick them up. Most copy places should make 8.5x11 color copies for 39 to 99 cents, and the laser prints turn out very nice.

What Kind of Paper Works Best?
The type of paper to use depends on what you plan to do with them. For almost all items, such as collage or jewelry, I'd go with a bright white paper that is slightly thicker than normal. Regular copy paper is about 20 pound, and card stock is normally 60 or 80 pound, so you'd probably want to go with a minimum 28 and preferably 32 pound paper.

I make wooden collage blocks from my collage sheets, and I print the photographs on glossy photograph paper, and the butterflies and other images on matte photograph paper. But that's because I like the images to be raised a little bit and I coat them in about 5 coats of sealer. If you want to use photograph paper, I avoid the super-cheap photo paper, for example from the $1 store, since it will run. HP, Office Depot, and Staples brand are all pretty good, with HP being the best. I often wait until the Sunday paper comes out and I see what good brand is on sale that week.

And of course, you can always simply print with whatever they have and see if you like it.