Going With The Wind

Reading Love Letters Written On The Wind

Remember my collage a day project, back in August? It really took on a life of its own, in a way that I'd never even dreamed it could. Digital collage has become my primary creative work, and I want to chase it all the way down the rabbit hole to wonderland.

Crowgirls

A couple of months ago, I was looking at my collage above, Crowgirls. This phrase floated through my head: "Even crowgirls get the blues." And like a cosmic smack upside the head, I knew that this was what I'd been looking for: a new identity for my creative work. A second wind to lift my sails and take me off on a new journey. You can read more about that day here.

Crowgirl Studio is my new baby. The response has been amazing. My digitally collaged illustrations are available as prints and cards, and I even put together a calendar for 2015. I hope you'll join me over at the new blog or Tumblr or Pinterest.

I may pop in here, once in a while, to share some thoughts or photos or art/craftwork, but my energies are going into Crowgirl, and I would really love it if you came along for the ride. See you there!

Feeding The Shadow

Feeding the Shadow Within

I am really pleased with my recent work. Collage is a visual language I've always wanted to learn - to do something similar to favorite artists like Nick Bantock or Anahata Katkin. It's complex, beautiful, and hard to do harmoniously. I'm feeling my way into it one piece at a time, learning to use my own creative voice as I remix images from the past and present to make something new.

One of the really lovely things about all the work I've been doing lately is that I now have enough of a body of work that I can get something of a wild hair and go off on a whim and apply to a juried website like InPrint.

InPrint is a juried membership print-on-demand website, and I applied and got in. It's really cool in a lot of ways, because they do more to promote their artists than similar sites and artists get to keep a significantly larger percentage of their sales. While I'm going to be keeping my Society6 shop going (they do greetings cards and phone cases), I'm just a bit overjoyed to be able to share my InPrint store for fine art prints of my work.

Feeding the Shadow Within is available as a print.

Mixed Media Fall

Her Autumn Journey

As we (fingers AND toes crossed) move towards fall, I'm working mostly with digital collage. I love the flexibility of the medium – not to mention how forgiving it is! I can make mistakes without losing anything. Nothing is permanent. It makes me happy to share my work on my Tumblr and here.

How Raven Stole The Sun

A couple of weeks ago, I asked friends to inspire me to create digital collages by offering me a basic idea for a visual story, a single word, or a link to an image to work with. Working my way through the list actually gives me some structure, and that makes it easier to get going on new pieces.

Maid, Mare and Moon

I found myself with an interesting little mental hurdle. For a while, I was fretting, just a little, over what I thought the friends who made suggestions expected to see vs. what I wanted to create from the various ideas. Creating for someone else, vs. creating for myself/the sake of creation.

She Has Turned The Page

For example, this piece was sparked from the idea of "a secret forest grove deep inside an abandoned factory building." This is what I ended up doing with the idea. In the end, I decided that the ideas were meant to serve as springboards and that what I did with them was strictly up to me.

Collage: Art Finds A Way

Most of the time, August's daily collages were creative exercises for me - creative expression rather than emotional. There were two exceptions, though, and they are two of my favorite pieces of the collection.

She Is Her Own Shelter

I created She Is Her Own Shelter after our dinner out that night at our favorite sushi restaurant was nearly spoiled by another customer: a man of a certain age who came in with his family and was loudly self-entitled and complaining the entire time we were there. Seriously, we could hear him from the other end of the sushi bar, he was creating such a disruption. There are a lot of men like that in my family. I have a hard time being around someone like that – I was going to say "in public", but really "anywhere" would be closer to the truth – so instead of being able to enjoy our meal, I felt tense, watchful, and ready to fight or flee.

A Collage A Day In August

Daily Collage #30 - Her Majesty

For August, I set myself a creative challenge: create thirty-one collages in thirty-one days, with the intent to flex my creative muscles, share my work with the world, and build a new body of work.

Here are some of the things I learned over the course of the project:

• Showing up to the page (virtual or otherwise) every day, whether I want to or otherwise, is powerful. Necessity really is the mother. 
• There are images that I like to use again and again, like vintage photographs, stars, the moon, the sky, wings, flowers, leafs, trees, ravens and other birds, cats. Finding new ways to use them is wonderful.

Prints (and some other fun things) are available in my Society6 shop.

Here's my basic process, more or less, when creating a collage: