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:

Almost Fall...

Collage Project, Twenty Days In

A selection of my digital collages

Ten days left in my collage a day project. I really hit my stride a few days in, and it's been all learning, fun, and experimentation ever since. I'll share my thoughts about the process and what I've learned from it at the end of the month.

See all the collages here.

Some are available as prints and other fun things in my Society6 shop.