Ack!

I just realized that I never did blog about my collaging workspace, which I finally got cleaned up enough to show off in public. The pictures have been on my Flickr all week, but I forgot to mention it here.



So yeah, this is my tiny little dining room table. We don't really have a dining room, of course--this is in a little section of the living room that's near to the kitchen. In fact, if you look at the top left of the picture, that's the back of our microwave.

The brown and pink cardboard box (used to hold ramen noodles) is where I keep my stamps, inkpads, and sticky stuff--glue, tape, etc. Beneath that is a plastic container with drawers for SOME of my paper. The green and white box to the right of that is the rest of my paper (well, almost all of the rest). The tiny purple box is actually my hand-sewing stuff... it's been on the table lately because I was sewing charms onto ACEOs a week or more ago. The two jars at the right used to hold pickles and parmesan cheese; now they hold pens, pencils, and paint brushes. In front of those are my larger hole punches, and a stack of cards that are awaiting envelopes before I can list them.

Beneath the table, I store some empty cardboard boxes, along with whatever bubble wrap and packing peanuts I've received that are in good enough shape to reuse. There are chairs on the two sides of the table not flanked by the wall. One of them has random stuff tossed on it and more stuff beneath it. The other is where I sit.

Of course, these photos were taken on Sunday. Since then, Jerome has overtaken my table with the mango project. The mango project is probably going to drive me insane by Monday (when it's due), but perhaps then I'll have some fun stuff to show everyone. And a 3-week-overripe mango to do something with...

The Land of Oz

The EtsyRain Creative Challenge #5 is on a Wizard of Oz theme, so of course I had to give it a shot. Of course, I will be making more than one Wizard of Oz inspired piece, this is just the first.



It's an 8x10 collage, the biggest one I've ever made (at least within my adult life). The description on Etsy tells you about what the different images represent, but I gotta tell you about actually putting the thing together. :)

I had a basic idea in my head to begin with, about the structure of the piece overall. I wanted the central piece to be the Yellow Brick Road, and I started out with GRAND plans for it. We received an art supply catalog in the mail many months ago, and I've been hanging on to it for use in collages. When the art supply catalog shows off the assorted colors of paint that are available, they show what look like tiny bricks of color. So the yellow brick road is pieced together out of many many many little "paint samples." :)

The other pictures mainly came from a combination of archaeology magazines, kids magazines, and fashion magazines. It's funny to realize that, but when you're making collages, there are quite a few ways you can work with pretty much anything you have available. It's all about looking beyond the original composition of a fashion ad, for example, and picking out the pieces that work for your collage.

I think my main obsession with collages is that I can pretty much just use stuff that otherwise would need to be recycled or trashed. Even the base for this collage was "trash"--it was the piece of cardboard that came inside of a thermal shirt package. It's a perfectly nice piece of cardboard, and now it's even nicer with a Wizard of Oz collage attached to it! :)