Morning Collages -- Weeks 5-7

 

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Get caught up in my adventures from Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, & Week 4 wherein I disclose more about this mysterious creative process.

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Right when I thought I was getting into the swing of a new habit, I just stop. Sort of typical for me - it's like my own version of rebellion. When I know something is fun and I could do it every day, suddenly I find that I don't want to anymore. Instead of bemoaning this fact, I decided to just let myself sit down and create whenever I wanted, which meant this habit became not as daily. And that's fine. The more I try to do something 'perfectly' the more it sort of ruins the creative magic, you know?

So here's a smattering of my creative energy over the last three weeks. Three of which I did just this morning, to give you a sense of how uneven this creative process has been of late.

Morning Collages - Week 4

To get caught up, see my adventures in Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3, wherein I disclose more about this mysterious creative process.

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Another week, another batch of weird collages. This truly is the first thing I do every morning. I sit down at my little desk in the corner of my living room and bring out my tools - my hodge-podge of 'collections' - and make something. I've realized doing this that I love it and want to make bigger art works and eventually have more space in which to deploy my creative mania. But for now, carving out this little window of time for myself to play is just what I need.

Dig in!

Morning Collages - Week 3

To get caught up, see my adventures in Week 1 and Week 2, wherein I disclose more about this mysterious creative process.

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Officially this means I've formed a habit - 21 days of doing something new. 

I know it's a good one, too, because it doesn't feel like a chore. I genuinely look forward to waking up and shepherding these weird creations into my day. Every morning I allow whatever grabs my attention (of my gathered store of images/words/etc.), whatever I REALLY like, to find its way onto the page. It's like a Polaroid image of my inner self emerges every day for me to think about. And only I know all the associations and thoughts behind the collage, or what I left out at the last second. When my art journal is full, it will be a true representation of the state of my soul in 2020...

Morning Collages - Week 2

I can't believe it's been two weeks of this new morning routine. Check out Week 1 here. My mini Poe-themed art journal is filling up fast. What I originally thought was 'just gluing paper to other paper' has become a full creative process. Let me break it down and fill in the blanks as we go.

1. The Gathering Phase: 

You need a supply of images, words, colours that light you up. This has to be its own pre-collage step (the way I do it) because when I sit down to work my magic I don't want to have to search through actual magazines to find stuff. I have a folder that houses all the things I've gathered and I go into that to find my 1-2 things that I want to work with that morning. But anyways, the gathering phase could be setting aside a few hours one afternoon to gather together some source material (in my case it was avant guard art magazines because they have such weirdness in them, which I love). And then you just tear away, collecting any images, entire pages of colour for background, any headlines or other words that you just like. 

That's the key, though. Everything is WHAT YOU LIKE. You don't need to know why, just that you really like it and want to keep it (like a hummingbird next to a skull haha, see below). Eventually you get this folder full of gems that you can eventually work with. But I've realized that it's important to have some time between when you collect the things and when you deploy them in a collage, so-called 'marinating' time in the creative process.

Morning Collages - Week 1

I've been wanting to do this for a while! I just didn't know how, until now...

So far I've been making bigger collages and making them into zines at a snail's pace. Like one zine a year. I wanted a way to bring this practice into my daily life somehow that wouldn't take all day - enter the daily morning collage. Jon gave me one of his mini notebooks from his (what seems like) infinite cache of notebooks for this purpose. Of course, it's Poe themed :P

I decided I would set myself the challenge of creating a collage every morning as part of my morning routine. I love morning routines, and for a while now I've been doing either Morning Pages (3 pages of free flow writing by hand) or some kind of seated meditation. I read and edit all day, so why not try something other than writing?