deconstructing the stapled collage

today i have the very great honor of being tammy's guest hostess for the daily paper prompt on the daisy yellow art blog, and i hope you'll come and visit me over there! my topic is the thing i've been obsessed with all summer long: the stapled collage! i'm showing a brand new example, plus a few old ones. my intention was to photograph my "process" of composing the layers of the collage, but it turns out i work waaaaaaay too amorphously for that idea to be successful. who knew, lol?! so instead, i just did my thing, but stopped at the crucial point after i was happy with my composition, but before i had attached anything. and then i worked backwards and photoed each layer, so you could see the sequence... only, in reverse! not to worry, i have no plans to make a habit of this sort of thing, but i confess it was kind of fun, just this once. :)

would you like to see the "official" finished product? it's pretty similar to the first photo up top, but there's a much nicer picture if you hop on over to the daisy yellow blog! see you there, darlings! ♥♥♥

(another) super-sized art journal post

still loving the daily paper prompts, generally, and my (rapidly filling up!) vintage ledger art journal, particularly. still finding it hard to photo and post them in a timely manner. so basically this sunday finds me exactly as usual, lol!

029: finishing

this prompt was sort of "freestyle" so i elected to make a super fast collage using only scraps, leftovers, and off-cuts that were sitting on the coffee table next to where i work in the evenings. and not only because it saved me having to clean them all up. which... ok, yeah... it also did! :)

030: invent a font

something i've never done, but want to do again, now!!!

031: art materials color palette

i've been wanting to make one for my brush markers, because sometimes the caps kind of... welllllll... lie!

032: puzzled

the brief was to use a bit of a crossword or other puzzle on a page. i filled the squares in by sewing on lines of tiny flower sequins. weirdly enough, when i checked the back of the book, all of my answers were correct! :) :) :) 

033: messing around with paint

this prompt was guest-hosted by natasha white, and it was a fun one whose title pretty much says it all. as a side note i should maybe mention that i could not seem to get my flung paint to land in anything but droplets of various sizes. maybe i was using too little paint? or too small a brush? eventually, wanting a bit more "connectivity" between my droplets, i spread them around with a brush and then kind of smooshed them together by folding the paper in on itself. i definitely succeeded in making a mess, however, so i feel fully vindicated in that regard.

034: block letters

as with the font assignment, another one that made me think, "i should draw with markers more!" and so i should! (for the record, the list represents all of the states i've been to so far; except i forgot texas!)

035: color grid

this prompt was hosted by hanna andersson and was most enjoyable! i decided to use water-soluble wax crayons, and i machine stitched my grid instead of drawing it with a marker; but other than that i followed directions completely. go, me! 

hope you are having a happy, fun, interesting, relaxing sunday... and that you will find a little time to do something ♥CREATIVE♥ today!!! :)

a liiiiiittle behind...

...on my daily paper prompt pages. partly because we're verrrrrry much looking forward to jeff's parents' visit to see the new house on saturday, and have been engrossed in lots of small last minute projects. partly because the labor day weekend turned into a marathon of shopping, shopping, and more shopping in order to acquire all those little bits and bobs that finish off a room. and partly because i just had waaaaaaay too many fun social opportunities in the week or so before school started, including multiple play dates with the nieces and nephew... and there's literally NOTHING in the world i won't blow off to go and spend an extra afternoon or two crocheting with riley, lindsay, madeline and matthew*!!! ♥

025: nature journaling

another example of me setting out with the intention of following the prompt much more literally than actually happened in the end. on the other hand, it's hard to regret, or apologize for, how far i strayed in this case, since this is one of my favorite pages of the summer! but then, being comprised almost equally of souvenirs from our hawaiian trip and vintage hawaiiana... and being my fave STAPLED COLLAGE so far... it kind of figures, right?!

026: slow journaling

this one i did EXACTLY as directed, and  enjoyed the process as much as the outcome! i tried a new blending idea using my watercolor crayons... not sure it was completely "successful" but it's definitely interesting! :)

027: swirly writing

more blending. writing on a curve. hand-cut stars. the words of dante gabriel rossetti. what's not to like?

028: do over

the direction on this day was to finish a prompt we had started OR take another pass at a favorite; i combined "mapping" with "the blues". part of me is embarrassed by how much of this summer i spent in my collagey comfort zone, but another part is so jazzed by all of the ideas and inspiration i'm having that it never seems to last for long! ♥

*the girls are really getting good at chaining and single crochet, and are working away on the rainbow scarf kits i made them at christmas for their american girl dolls. strictly speaking, matthew's input on these occasions is limited to practicing slipknots, choosing which color any of us ought to use next, and spontaneously belting out the WORLD'S BEST karaoke rendition of "eye of the tiger"!!!**

**i swear i am not making this up. and just for the record, you have not lived until you've seen/heard a not-quite-6-year-old do this. i highly recommend leaving beverages out of such a context, however. trust me. :) :) :)

so much for keeping up!

with posting my daily paper prompt pages. but then, the best laid plans of mice and men do often go awry. which makes me wonder... why mice?? i mean, when thinking of animals who would excel at planning well enough to get second billing to men, i'm not sure mice are *my* first choice. because foxes are sly... which suggests intelligence and probably a bit of planning, or at least a willingness to WAIT to attain a goal. beavers are impressive architects, which implies a certain amount of prowess and the completion of many tasks, in the correct order. chimpanzees have been known to make and use tools in order to achieve an objective. but in terms of thinking ahead, it's hard to beat the clever squirrel, who spends the late summer months finding and storing away enough food to last an entire winter! on the other hand, i suppose i can see how, "the best laid plans of squirrels and men..." failed to offer sufficient poetical gravitas to robert burns. so mice it is. wanna see some journal pages?

019: the blues

this prompt was suggested and hosted by patricia from magenta matters, and it was a fave of mine. i used paints thru a stencil, did some paper collage on top, and finished off with some random... blue... rub-ons. et voila!

020: mail art

i know, i know, i should've made a REAL piece of art and mailed it to somebody, but i got carried away with my vintagey bits. ah well.

021: stamp a mandala

for once i did EXACTLY what i was told! (please notice and applaud, 'cause WHO KNOWS when/if it'll ever happen again, lol!) of course, then i added paper flowers. and lots of stitching. embellishment junkie? ummmmmm... yeah... that'd be me...

022: mapping

here's an idea that was sooooooooooooo awesome inside my head: paste a whole lotta maps together to make one big, new, uber-map of an imaginary place. in real life, it didn't quiiiiiiite work, or at least the result of this attempt does not look nearly as cool as i had hoped. maybe there is not enough variation in map styles or... well... ok, i don't really know why this doesn't excite me, but i'm fine with it being what it is. and who knows, i might take another crack at it one of these days!

023: draw a mandala

another big win for following directions!!! what are the odds??! but seriously, i really like this one. and i'm sure you'll be seeing more of these because they are so much fun!

024: ATCs

my favorite part of this page is actually not the ATCs themselves, although i like them. my favorite part is the clear plastic pocket thingie i constructed to hold the cards on the page. here's a shot that shows it better:

yeah... you can take them out, or move them around or... whatever! ok, admittedly, i'm probably the only one who finds this exciting, but don't worry, because i definitely find it exciting enough for ALL OF US, darlings!!! so you're welcome, lol! :) :) :)

keeping up!

with posting my daily paper prompt pages, i mean. trying to be a little more resolved and organized about photo-ing as i go; so i don't wind up with additional embarrassing 8-page posts. so here's a nice little three-fer for ya! yay! :)

016: dictionary love

i DO love dictionaries, as a matter of fact: i love collecting them, i love looking stuff up in them, i love using them in art.* i found the alan watts quote online; the line-drawn-lady was on the cover of a catalog.

017: chandelier

the fixture in question is from a very old (but still available!) set of digi brushes, i had printed it out on a transparency (probably to fill in a page; inkjet transparencies are not cheap!) which i found the other night; it's the centerpiece of my BIGGEST stapled collage to date, woohoo. i have to confess that i needed three strategically placed staples to hold this one together; i just couldn't keep everything on there AND visible with only one this time.

018: travel

ok, technically, the brief for this one was to create a travel art kit, but since i already have a long-established one of those (there's a photo midway through this post!) i decided to go off on a tangent. so i did. and i like it! :)

*the books i use in my collages are already-damaged and bought specifically for that purpose from book sales, garage sales, and the pile of orphaned coverless things which seems to dwell in the foyer of every library throughout the world. if you ever wonder, "WHO buys those?"... now you know. :) i've written a couple of post about cutting up books, and i'm especially proud of this one, which describes my oprah-style "lightbulb" moment on this subject; this one's ok, too; and this one has a pretty good footnote on what i call "dead books walking". suffice it to say that beautiful, pristine, perfect or rare volumes not only NEVER meet such a fate at my hands, they have a large and most-honored place in my home! ♥♥♥

ps: weirdly enough, the one category of people who never even cringe when they hear that some of the less-than-perfect volumes i buy are destined for my art lair and not my bookshelves are... wait for iiiiiit... LIBRARIANS! because no one better understands the vastly impossible logistics involved in trying to reverently and permanently preserve every single copy of every single book in the world. afterall, just how do you think all those ex-library books wind up FOR SALE at booksales, anyway?? yeah. circle of life, my friends. circle of life.

giant bumper crop of art journaling

hooray for catching up! although actually, i've never been more than about a day behind in making pages for the daily paper prompt. the bottleneck always comes is in the photo-n-post phase. this time it's a little embarrassing. i blame the summer cold i've been fighting, the main symptom of which seems to be extreme laziness! :)

008: window/faded

i'm still obsessed with cutting holes in my pages and then strategically filling them in. this is my favorite version to date. the doilies, butterflies and dalai lama quote are on this page. the soft faded face illustration is on the page behind... with a soft faded pink transparency on top.

009: faded

oh yeah and a whole bunch of sentiment rub-ons, too! mostly because i always have a ZILLION extra of those and wanted to play around with new ways of using them

010: ogee pattern

still diggin' the water soluble wax crayons, and trying to practice blending them so the colors are smooth... without taking off ALL the pigment in the process. and yeah, my ogee is a little OMG... but i still like it!

011: stitched paper

the majority of my pages have stitching on them, but for this one i planned it from the start and the stitching is actually holding most of the paper scraps on the page; with only a tiny bit of dryline glue to keep the (semi) log-cabin-quilt pattern from shifting around.

012: round

all of these were found in my "pre-cut" file, except for monet's waterlillies which is a postcard that serendipitously arrived from my friend deborah on the day i made this page.

013: grid

a collage made on a ledger page grid using scraps of paper which all have grids or numbers or both. why?? why not!!! ♥

014: saturated color/another grid

more water soluble crayon blending; this is actually a chart which shows what each crayon looks like in action, because not all of them really look like the labels suggest.

015: words

i found this ♥AWESOME♥ audrey hepburn quote online... in english... a few weeks ago, whilst googling for something completely different. and by golly, paris *IS* always a good idea! (but then audrey would never steer us wrong, would she?!)

more giant ledger goodness!

i've been having a blast playing in my new art journal, with inspiration and the good example of tammy, our hostess for the daily paper prompt, and the fabulous work being posted by all of the daisy yellow readers!

003: flowers

i'm still hooked on monochromatic layers; trying to get as much "depth" into flat pages as i possibly can. also pretty into silhouettes right now; i made this one while cutting out a figure from a magazine... the layer i held behind the lady was of this cool anna aspnes paper with the clouds and trees.

004: windows

again a lot of layers on top of the page, and then a large star... plus lots of small punched dots... cut out to reveal a bit of the page below. (which, yeah, is actually the one i made BEFORE this b/c i liked what you could see of it better; the advantage of working with a ledger is the cover lifts off so you can re-arrange pages any time you want!)

005: linear

this was going to be a grid of objects, centered around the 1970's instamatic photo of my family in a boat on a vacation we took one year to canada. i'm not sure how it became a super-inky scrapbook page, but i think i kinda like it! :) 

006: punk window

no one's gonna "get" this except amy t and me, which is fine. we saw these amazing wrinkled crinkly plastic dresses at the met's fabulous punk exhibit, and i was thinking how cool it would be to use wrinkled crinkly plastic as a window on a page. i've sandwiched a few roughly torn magazine images into the plastic, and sewn on one of my instagrams taken on the roof of the museum that same day. then i tried to create some chrysanthemums like the ones imran qureshi had painted there. this is one of the oddest things i've made... and i think maybe my favorite... it really sums up that day for me AND contains so many new ideas i want to continue exploring. i'm not sure it's actually interesting to anyone else, so i'm sorry about that, but i promise to post something really PRETTY and polished looking on tuesday! ♥

007: leftovers

this has more plastic as in the idea above, which i've used to make really rough magazine image transfers, and then embedded with scraps of paper. oh yeah and i stitched some clusters of flowers on top! :) again, a page that's ALL ABOUT process, as opposed to outcome. the leftovers of the title refer to some of the bits on the page, but mostly to the fact that i still had A LOT of ideas i wanted to try out, and this seemed like a great place to write them down.