Sticky Fingers

I’ve been paper collaging like mad the past week or so to give my brain time to develop quilting plans for a few pieces. Ignoring something is often a surefire way to have solutions find me. And I wanted to work more with paper anyway.

Thanks to collage classes that have you create papers to use, I have a healthy supply of solid and patterned papers. In addition, I have a backlog of magazine pages from the Sunday NY Times, plus lots of monoprint rejects from my friend Penny. Then there are the wallpaper samples she gave me, and my rejects from monoprinting and painting classes.

So now I have a paper scrap glut in addition to a fabric one, but I’ve been organizing my papers while I work on collages.

I set out to assemble collage parts that could be used to quickly make a larger composition. I got the idea from Mary Beth Shaw of Stencil Girl, but many others have a similar approach. That went well with organizing my papers as I combined color families and similar styles and cut out images.

It’s a good thing I bought new sharp paper scissors.

Then gradually the parts became whole compositions.

Birds was made almost totally from bits Penny gave me. The background is a magazine page she used to clean her brayer. The gold half moon is a rejected monoprint, as is the patterned piece on the upper left. The small birds are from a napkin she gave me. I stitched together the big pieces, and used markers to emphasize some of the birds’ features.

Squiggles began as a sheet of mark making, with curved lines painted in acrylic. I used a white gel pen to add more marks, and the odd one out was actually a collage part I made. The pieces are sewn to a vinyl wallpaper sample.

Orange Caterpillar combines acrylic paint experiments with markers, monoprint rejects, and part of an ad for a purse.

Lemons uses Penny’s monoprints and images cut from magazines. Again, it’s sewn to a vinyl wallpaper sample. Thanks to a class by the Jealous Curator I learned how to fussy cut such images.

Boats began as an art part, but grew with bits of monoprints, markers and oil pastels. I keep revising it, but I think it’s now jumped the shark.

These two are more what I had in mind for parts. I glued (glue stick) lots of torn scraps over a watercolor experiment cut in half. Maybe paint will be the next step.

As per usual I crammed too much into each piece. However, I am learning to use realistic images and rely more on a glue stick rather than matte medium. (I also learned that not all glue sticks are created equal. I was satisfied with the Leeho brand I had on hand, but not with the Scotch brand.) It was making me crazy to find that each collage class I took (I relied mostly on free Creativebug classes available through my library) called for a different way to adhere paper. I found that medium is too heavy for thin magazine papers and can cause the ink to smear, especially if you use medium below and over the image. However, if you use a heavy paper like bristol or watercolor you need the medium for staying power.

I hope to continue the use of photographic images in my collages and allow for more white space. My quilting background makes me think every space has to contain some material. At some point I’ll learn that paper doesn’t fall apart if you leave part of it empty. Maybe by then I’ll have learned to keep the glue on the paper and off my fingers.

I’m linking to Off The Wall Friday.