Saturday, May 27, 2017

more collages?

as you know, i'm super excited about the fact that ICAD* officially starts on thursday** and while i have not been able to participate in all the pre-ICAD festivities, on the day that tammy posted the "one-staple collage" warm up exercise, OF COURSE i had to drop everything and make a one-staple collage on an index card. because that's the way i roll. meanwhile, there are a few full-sized collages from the last couple of weeks that i haven't posted, so this seems like a good time to show you those, as well.

one-staple index card collage
asking the musical question: 
how many things can you stack in a 3x5 space and still see them all? 
1) a tabbed index card base 
2) a scrap of vintage ledger paper 
3) a strategically torn piece of garden plan 
4) another (different) type of vintage ledger paper
5) common plant names from an english/thai pocket tourist dictionary;
6) a small section of green paint chips 
7) a flower illustration from a tiny, falling-apart, 1910-ish field guide 
8) butterfly punched from a "chinese for kids" workbook page. 

...so the answer is "EIGHT" then! :)

mother's day collage
lately i've seen quite a few cool collages on instagram where, instead of being fussy cut, the elements are all arranged kind of geometrically. which i find fascinating and cool. so of course i've had a few tries at this and i'm sure there will be more. i don't think i've really "cracked it" yet, but as with the one-staple format, changing the rules really makes you look at EVERYTHING differently, which is often quite inspiring.
(ps: i don't know the people in the vinatge photo, but it says on the back, in beautiful copperplate handwriting, "yvonne ward and isabel greer at cargygray ireland, 1957")

bird collage
again, playing somewhat with the grid idea, though the four arched doorways were on one page in a falling apart fodor's guide to india, c1975. the birds are cut from a beautiful paper napkin and i love the way they are a tiny bit see-through once you peel them down to one layer! 

avalokiteshvara gridded collage
in the midst of my gridded collage mania, i found a cool schematic in an old needlework book for a sort of strange 1970's stitch sampler, where blocks of pattern are layered over and under each other... (the sampler, shown on another page, was of course executed in shades of lemon yellow, avocado green and burnt orange, as all decor items were federally mandated to be in the 1970's) ...for the most part, i'm not a "scan-and-duplicate" collage artist, but this was SO COOL i needed to scan it. plus, that meant i could print it out on a transparency and place most of my layers under it, on the grid!
(yes, i know, i get inordinately excited about things like this, lol!)


*the index card a day project, aka ICAD has been hosted by tammy garcia on the daisy yellow art blog for the last seven years; this will be my sixth year participating! ♥

**the (totally optional!) prompts for each week are posted on the sunday before, which means that anyone who is chompin' at the bit to get going could snag the prompts TOMORROW and start working a teeny bit early. not that i'm going to do that... ok yeah... i'm almost certainly going to do that... ;)

1 comment:

  1. These are magical ... might be an idea for art camp ... love them all.

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