Tuesday, February 16, 2010

heart the art: week 7 (never)

woohoo!!! i've made...and i'm posting...my heart the art page at the beginning of the week!!! i am a proud & happy art journaler today! :)

ok, so this week's prompt was "NEVER" and appropriately enough, i did two things for this page i have never done before: #1 i decided what i wanted to make--an indian-themed collage--before i knew what the page would be about; and #2 i googled the words "never" and "quote" to see if i could come up with something around which to base such a collage. the really weird thing is, one of the very first returned answers was a quote of the buddha's which completely enthralled me!

at that point, i did something i almost ALWAYS do: allowed the page i thought i was going to make to morph into something else entirely! yeah. i started out making a complicated, colorful and mannnnnny layered magazine collage...and when i had very nearly everything ready to be glued down, i suddenly stripped away 90% of it and went with just a few images on a plain black background. go figure! i really like how it turned out, though.


(glossy black cardstock: ranger: labels: dymo; sunflower diecut: colorbok; embossed decoupage butterfly: micahels; buddha image cut from a museum brochure; swirly yellow circles cut from a magazine; adhesives: uhu gluestick, 3m foam tape)

text reads, "the whole secret of existence is to have no fear. never fear what will become of you; depend on no one. only the moment you reject all help are you freed."

everything you see here was in the "original" collage, in fact the first three things i chose were the little buddha, the sunflower and that swirly yellow motif. i layered those on some text from a hindi newspaper, there were lots more circle and swirl-based images, and the quote was typed on a little piece of patterned paper that was affixed to the back of the sunflower--which was going to be detachable, in that version.

then at some point i caught sight of my dymo labeller, and it occurred to me how entirely COOL it'd look to have the dymo-ed quote on a background of plain glossy black. of course, it took AGES to punch the whole thing out, and then it was far too big to fit on a 4x6" page and put anything else on there! ...UNTIL...i decided to trim the label strips down, very close to the words. then it fit with room to spare, but obviously the background bits of the collage had to be discarded to make the new idea work. and suddenly i was right back to my three originally selected bits--full circle, if you like! ♥

btw, there is a rather fab flickr group that host all of our heart the art pages...if you have a few minutes to spare, i highly recommend checking it out!

5 comments:

  1. This is just the COOLEST! LOVE it!

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  2. ooooh! Yippee! The first Never page I've seen. TOO cool. I love it. I love your Indian inspired stuff so much!!! The colors are amazing. I'm totally curious to what it looked like before editing. lol

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  3. this is simply amazing! i love reading about your process. makes me feel normal (because there's someone else whose brain works like mine!!!). i love that you use found items, too. brochures and magazine ads are the best for cool little images. i have been intending for a month now to join in with heart the art and haven't gotten to it yet. i like this "never" theme. i wanna play along!!! we'll see!!! you are so inspiring!

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  4. Most certainly VERY cool! You do the most amazing collages and this one is so striking!

    (-: Heidi

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  5. Lauren. This is the coolest collage ever. Love the buddha. My tri to Oslo went well and in my luggage I brought home with me a dymo labeller. Yes I've seen all the great projects where you've used it, so I can't wait to try it out.

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