KOLLA
KOLLA (κόλλα, "glue" — the word collage starts here) — the paste-up table beside TOME's cutting bench. A layer stack with blend modes for freeform collage: the mat is a boundless plane with no sheet and no rectangle — drop images anywhere, slide them around, pinch to scale and turn, connect them however you wish. One HTML file, no dependencies, no server, in the same cutting-mat design as TOMÉ.
What it does
- Pieces, anywhere — drop, paste, or open any number of images; each lands on the mat as its own piece. There is no boundary to stay inside.
- The stack — layer cards along the right edge, top of the list = top of the pile. Tap to select, eye to hide, a gold badge names any non-normal blend.
- Blend modes — all sixteen as a chip row, plus per-piece opacity. Blending happens against the pieces beneath only, never against the mat.
- Moving — drag a piece to slide it; a second finger scales and turns it around the pinch. Drag the bare mat to pan, pinch to zoom. Desktop: arrows nudge,
[]turn,-=scale, space pans, ⌘Z undoes. - The frame — square things off when you want to: drag out a frame, adjust or move it, clear it with a tap on the bare mat. Everything outside is only dimmed, never lost — until flatten, when the cut becomes permanent. Export honours it too.
- Crop into a piece — double-tap any piece (iOS-style) and crop handles appear on it; the hidden margins stay as a ghost and survive every save and reload. Non-destructive until a flatten or merge bakes it.
uncropbrings the whole piece back. - Fill — tap a piece for a solid, drag across it for a gradient along the drag: wash (fills its own pixels, shape and soft edges kept), behind (a ground behind a cutout), or sheet (drag out a brand-new fill piece).
- Stack ops — bring forward / send back, duplicate, merge ↓, flatten, png ↓.
- ✂ cutout — AI background removal per piece (fal.ai).
- Tap-to-lift — the ai tool's pointer: tap anything and SAM segmentation lifts just that object onto its own layer, in place. Scissors that know where the edges are.
- Fuse — re-dream the collage (the frame, or everything) as one image at low drift, so the pieces share light and grain; lands on top as a new layer.
- Expand — flatten and outpaint past the edges on all four sides.
A collage is rarely finished in one sitting
The whole table — pieces, transforms, blends, crops, the frame — autosaves in the browser after every change and is waiting when the app reopens. save ⇩ writes the same thing as a .kolla file: open or drop it later, on any machine, to continue exactly where you left off. clear starts a fresh table (undo brings the old one back).
The bench next door
TOMÉ and KOLLA are two benches in one workshop, one click apart. TOMÉ's kolla → sends the current cut over as a new piece; KOLLA's ← tomé sends the collage (framed or whole) back to be cut. The handoff is a cross-window message with the pixels riding along.
Lives in TROY/KOLLA (kolla.html, port 8783), deployed at https://auriea.art/kolla.html — born 2026-08-14 with the iOS full-screen fix built in, rebuilt freeform the same day.