Legacy Star Designs
Mixed Media Collection
Volume 01
Mixed Media Volume 01 is exactly what it sounds like — a collection that pulls from everywhere at once. Postage stamps, vintage newspaper ads, old sheet music, architectural blueprints, ornate frames, alphabet specimens, a crowned raven, an ace of spades — it's like someone upended a very interesting drawer onto a light table and let the layers talk to each other. The backgrounds were built from stamps and illustrations, layered into dense, textural collages that reward a second (and third) look. Each piece holds together around a monochrome foundation — grays, whites, and soft blacks — with red doing the heavy lifting as the accent color throughout.
That red-on-monochrome approach is a deliberate nod to a very specific era. If you were around in the 80s, you know exactly what this is — that high-contrast, graphic design moment when red was the statement color, the thing that made your eye stop before it could move on. It could get heavy-handed fast, and honestly, it often did. Here it's kept intentional: a baroque frame in deep crimson, a butterfly stamp, flourishes curling through architectural line drawings, a starburst crown that looks like it belongs on a band's first album cover. The result sits somewhere between a collage artist's sketchbook and a scrapbook from a decade that had a lot of opinions about typography.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 01
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 01 This one sets the tone for the whole collection. Layers of Victorian-era newspaper ads, typeface specimen sheets, and handwritten text pile up across the surface, with a delicate henna-style floral illustration winding through the middle in soft rose — lighter and more intricate than the deeper reds that show up later in the series. The background carries a ghost print of a damask-style swirl pattern underneath everything, giving the piece a sense of depth that keeps it from going flat.
The typography is the real star here. Blackletter scripts, bold display fonts, ad copy for borax soap and health salts, fragments of cursive — it reads like a print shop had a very productive afternoon and nobody cleaned up after. The overall palette stays cool and quiet, white and soft gray with just enough warm rose to pull the eye through without announcing itself too loudly. A good opener.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 02
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 02 The background of this piece is built from decorative stamp-style illustrations — postal meters, postage denominations, first-class mail markings — layered into a dense, paper-gray collage that evokes the feeling of a well-traveled correspondence archive. It's texture as atmosphere, the visual shorthand for distance and time.
What makes this one personal is what's on top. The red foreground elements are original illustrations, some of them reaching back to the 1990s — mandala-style florals and flowing organic forms that predate the digital era entirely. There's something quietly striking about that contrast: a background built from commercial stamp art, and a foreground drawn by hand across decades, all held together by the same red-on-monochrome palette running through the collection.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 03
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 03 This one leans hardest into the stamp collage of the collection, with decorative illustration stamps layered wall-to-wall across the background — postal marks, floral medallions, script fragments, dot patterns, and clock faces all competing for the same real estate. It's dense in the best way, the kind of surface that reveals something different every time you look at it. A few of the stamps were modified from their original form, which gives the collage a slightly more custom feel than a straight assembly job.
The foreground is where the piece finds its personality. A crowned raven sits inside a circular frame with the text "The raven and the father, fishing" curling around it — gothic and a little cryptic, exactly as intended. An ace of spades anchors the upper left. A large baroque frame in deep red dominates the center, its oval window left open like a placeholder for something you're supposed to fill in yourself. Ink splatter marks in black punctuate the upper right, adding just enough grit to keep the whole thing from getting too decorative. This one has a darker edge than the first two.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 04
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 04 The background here is another full stamp collage — sheet music and waltz notation across the top half, Victorian newspaper ad copy on the right, postal marks and postcard fragments crowding the lower left, all of it layered into a busy but cohesive gray-and-white field. Nautical stars in the upper right add an unexpected element, sitting somewhere between a sheriff's badge and a compass rose. Ink splatter in the left margin makes another appearance, a recurring bit of controlled chaos that runs through the collection.
The red foreground is all original illustration — a tall, ornate baroque frame takes center stage, more vertical and elongated than the oval version in the previous piece, its scrollwork detailed enough to reward close inspection. Organic curling forms anchor the corners, and a smaller flourish on the lower right echoes the mandala work from the earlier pieces. The frame's open center has the same quality as the one before it — an empty space that feels deliberate rather than unfinished, like it's waiting for something. Between the sheet music, the postcard scraps, and that frame, this one has the feeling of a very elegant letter that never got sent.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 05
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No 5This one has a darker personality than the first two. The background is built entirely from decorative stamp illustrations — postal marks, floral medallions, script fragments, clock faces, and dot patterns layered into a dense gray collage. A few of the stamps were modified from their original form, which keeps it from reading as a straight assembly job.
The foreground is where the mood shifts. A crowned raven perches inside a circular frame, the text "The raven and the father, fishing" curling around it — gothic and just cryptic enough to make you want to know the rest of the story. An ace of spades sits in the upper left, matter-of-fact about what it is. A large baroque oval frame in deep red dominates the center, its scrollwork heavy and ornate, the open window at its heart left deliberately empty. Ink splatter in black punctuates the upper right corner — a recurring element in this collection that keeps showing up like a signature. This is the piece in the series that would look most at home on a rainy afternoon.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 06
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 06 This one takes a sharp turn from the postal and newspaper collages earlier in the series. The background shifts to architectural line drawings — Gothic cathedral details, arched windows, column capitals, tracery and vaulting rendered in precise technical drafting style. It's a quieter, more structural backdrop than the busier stamp layers in the previous pieces, and it gives this one a more formal, almost academic quality.
The foreground illustrations were rendered in Cricut Design Space, and the lineage shows in the best way — the ornamental scrollwork and baroque frame elements have a crispness that contrasts well against the softer drafting lines behind them. A large rectangular frame in dusty red dominates the right half, filled with a damask pattern that adds another layer of texture within the frame itself. The upper left pulls in large-scale Gothic ornament details, bold enough to hold their own against the architectural drawings underneath. This is the most architectural piece in the collection so far, and probably the most quietly dramatic — less ink-splatter energy, more cathedral.
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 07
Mixed Media - Volume 01, No. 07 A strong closer. The background carries forward the architectural line drawings from number six — Gothic arches, cathedral details, ornamental panels — tiled into a grid-like collage that gives the whole surface a blueprint quality. Red baroque and damask stamp illustrations layer over it, some from the Temu collection, pushing the background into something denser and more decorative than the cleaner drafting aesthetic of the previous piece.
The centerpiece is a crown on a starburst, rendered in solid black — bold enough to stop the eye cold in the middle of all that layered detail. It's the most graphic, most direct image in the entire collection, and it earns that position as the finale. The surrounding red foreground mixes original illustrations with decorative stamp elements, scrollwork and flourishes curling through the lower half and corners, an oval frame sitting quietly at the bottom left. The red runs deeper and more saturated here than anywhere else in the series, which gives this one the most visual weight of the seven. It feels like a closing statement — which, as the last piece in Volume 01, is exactly what it should be.