Nov 14, 2020

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

Edgar Allan Poe notebook

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?

Step 1: Invite chaos onto the surface of your desk.



Step 2: Bring out the stash of random, weird images for more artistic fodder.




You can create this stash from magazines. I've collected a bunch of art magazines from Little Free Libraries while out and about on walks (pre-Covid of course ...). So I started there.


Step 3: Make your hot beverage of choice and sit down to create 
strange wonders out of this madness :P







The few constraints I set myself for this experiment were: 1) You have 30-40 mins total, 2) you fill 1 page a day. And sometimes I add other little creative constraints like "today you can't use scissors." 






I love the experience of just sitting down and creating some mini artistic thing out of the chaos of colour, images, and words strewn across my desk. And using images I've kept around for years now...


Also, this isn't simply a morning routine. This is actually a form of Creative Cross-Training! It's a way for me to step out of the bigger projects I'm working on and experiment with other creative forms. Right now that happens to be daily collages in a Poe-themed art journal.


Yes, this is the 'no-scissors' one! Very tactile with the end result being glue-fingers. :P


Until next week,

-Erika


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2 comments:

  1. This is a creative daily activity! I haven’t seen anyone do this before, such a great idea. For my daily activity, I’ve been trying to journal in different styles. I’ll have to check this out!

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    1. Thanks for your comment, Savannah! I've been doing Morning Pages (3 pages of free-writing) for a while, but because I'm a freelance editor and work with words all day, I wanted to add a more visual arts component. It's really fun - why not give it a try!

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