Bright & Happy Collage-Scrap Collage

Good Morning !!

Well.... it is morning while I am creating this post that is.

Last night I was at the art table, looking around to see what kind of collage piece I wanted to try next. I had an idea of one made in a different composition than I had used before that would have different sections with totally different little collages in them. I drew off a perimeter to help me stay in the lines and then started to look for the papers I would use on it. In the middle of the thought, the thought changed and .... as I was cutting a piece to fit one section, the scrap piece that drop off was one of these long sharp triangle'ish pieces that is on the below photo. I stopped....I looked at that piece. I LIKED that piece and that shape and all of the sudden, all of that first idea was put on the back burner and this piece began to take shape.

I cut a few more similar pieces, painted a 5 x 7 canvas board black and began to arrange the three pieces I had chosen. I glued them on just right and thought it was going to be done, in it's simplicity. Although I loved it's bright happy colors beaming out of it's geometric boldness, my brain said "are you SURE it's done?".... after waffling on it a bit, I finally decided to try a couple of circles cut from the same collage paper of different sizes and played with different positions they might go in. When I got to this idea, I knew they belonged, so I glued them on too and VWA-LA !! Now it really WAS done. Still simple and bright and not too cluttered in composition.

I had to wait till this morning to get the photo. It looked good in the photo last night, but you know, indoor night light is just different. Much better to retake in the natural morning light.

As I sometimes do, I played with it after I got it on my computer and I did think that this orientation made for a neat 2nd option for display. Some abstracts seem to have one way or the other that the eye likes better, but this one pretty much looked good any way I turned it.

I know what I have just shown you looks simple and like it should have just taken me two seconds to complete and I understand that, but you know, since I came up with it while sitting there, even that process takes a little while and as for the papers, this is how they came to exist.

First you have to know that sometime in the past months, every paper you see here was painted directly or stenciled with paint or pressed on the gel press. These pieces I used here are made of bits of many of those original collage papers.

Over a couple of evenings in the past few weeks, I decided to make new collage papers out of the scraps of some previous collage papers. I keep them in containers beside where I play. When I make collages and tear the different papers I am using to create whatever I am creating at the time, it always leaves leftover pieces of that paper. Sometimes they are larger and sometimes smaller. I do keep them for possible use later, all except the tiniest bits.

It got to where I just had loads of small scraps, so many, that although I still would go through them for accent pieces on other works, they were beginning to overrun the containers. So one night when I was at my art table and thinking on what I would do next, I decided to take a coloring book page and glue some of the smaller scraps to it to create new and beautiful collage papers. I pulled out the scrap containers and began to pick out multiple colored pieces and gluing them on till the page was covered. When that was done, I decided I should do one with only assorted warm colors and another with only assorted cool colors, so they might fit in as accents on future pieces no matter what color category I was working with.

One night I did one page of each, cool, warm & both mixed. It was so much fun and I still had so many scraps left, that the next day I did it again ! Below is what came of it and remember, these are not supposed to be actual art pieces, but just more collage papers that could be torn up and used again.

On the left of each photo are the ones I made the first night and on the right are the ones I did the second night. It seems I used more pieces on each the second night.

The multi-colors, warm and cool tones together. (the one on the right was used to make the above piece.)

The cool colors.

The warm colors.

Here it is in my audition frame. 😄

When that was done, I played with one more from one of the cool colored scrap pages. It's a pretty neat start, not sure it is finished, but in case it never changes, I decided to end with it, just for the fun of it.

AT the time I made the collage-scrap collage papers, I didn't envision using them alone to create pieces of art, I pictured part of them being a single bright POP in some other created piece. Many times what I think I will do with something, doesn't turn out to be what I do with it and that's all good.

The point to showing and telling about making the papers was to show that even though at the time of the piece creation, it may appear to be a simple composition made with a few simple cuts, there were many processes in the creation of the papers that were actually used. If you included the first papers being made, then the scrap papers being reused to make new and happy papers, to get to the end, there was much more time than it might seem on the surface.

I don't keep up with the time in general, I'm just having a good time and every part of the process made me happy while I was doing it.

I didn't cook anything to take to Mom's this weekend, but I was desiring something from a local Restaurant called Golden China, so I will be stopping there on the way to Mom's to pick up some of our favorites. Yum !

I hope you are all doing well.

Luv Ya !

Jacey