Thursday, April 21, 2011

April collages and Easter plans

I try to blog about three times a week. Life gets in the way sometimes, but that's my goal. I was planning to do this post tomorrow (friday), but I came up with a little personal plan for Easter that kind of forced me to do an early post on my April Collages.


What are April Collages? you may wonder. Well they are collages made by me in April (I swear somebody ought to pay me to come up with these names!). It's a little project I started to challenge myself into doing half an hour of abstract collage everytime I go into the studio, before I start with my 'regular' stuff. The collages are 20x20 cm (about 8x8 inches) and the rules are:
- I may only work on them for half an hour at a time
- I may only use decorative papers and my glaze pen (so no paints and other supplies allowed)
- I may only work in abstract, so no images and no lettering


The idea is to get a little more comfortable with collage in itself and learning to just use shapes and forms for a composition. So far I have made about 6 collages this way and it's pretty interesting to do. It takes me about an hour to do one of them, so I can never finish one in one sitting, which is good too to train my patience muscle a little and learn to stop when it's time.

In this post I am showing you the first three I did. It's more difficult than I thought to work according to these self made rules, but I am sticking to them the best I can. This little challenge may be the first of more of taking 30 minutes of each studio session to practice something I want to learn or just do more of.


I'll show more of these collages in some next post(s).

Don't the shapes in the last one remind you of pretty  decorated Easter eggs? And wouldn't you know it, Easter is about to be here. I will have a glorious four days off and I have decided to spend them as a kind of hermit. I'm going off line for a few days, both computerwise and art wise. That is to say, no studio time, no sewing room, no internet. But...I have decided to spend my four days as if I am on vacation on my own island.

I have packed a satchel with some simple art supplies like I do when I travel and I have picked up a simple watercolor sketchbook. I am going to draw this weekend! I will go on long walks and bring my sketchbook instead of my camera. It will be like a little private four day sketchcrawl ;-) I have no idea how this will work out, but it should be fun ;-) I think I should call this the Easter Draw Event or something, haha.

Wishing you all a wonderful Easter and see you next week!