I really enjoyed making these and they have given me all sorts of ideas. Like, what if I made these kinds of collages and added stitching? Or what if I made paintings after these collages where instead of paper I would make the shapes with paint? That's the cool thing about trying something new, it leads to even more things to try out. Artsy people are never bored as long as they keep experimenting!
What I also really liked was starting my studio time with a regular exercise. It was like flexing the creative muscles. I now have set up a sort of new routine because of this. Whenever I have several hours in the studio I start with half an hour of a self imposed challenge like the April Collages. And after that I spend half an hour on things like preparing backgrounds with gesso or doing other prep work. Right now I am gessoing the papers of the altered atlas I am making, which is rather tedious work if you do it for too long. A half hour a day goes a long way however and after spending the first hour of my studio time on some sort of routine like this I am all ready to get busy with the 'real' work, whatever project I may be working on at the time.
Anyway I have decided to continue the 30-minutes-of-practicing-something-followed-by-30-minutes-of prep-work routine and for May I am going to be drawing! To not have to think too much about this (What should I draw?) I am using the challenges of the Every Day Matters group. It should be fun to see what will come out of that.