Once again I’m stuck waiting for paint to dry, so I might as well blog.
I went a little crazy with collage in my journal last night. After sketching in a quick self-portrait from memory, I began gluing in a background of various-sized circles in bright colors. Then I did a bit of simple stamping. And then I got the bright idea of using a stray bit of polyester chiffon fabric as an element, so I cut it to the shape of my self-portrait’s shoulders and glued that down, too.
The fabric, I should add, is a small-scale leopard print. The background colors are various shades of orange and aquamarine, with little bits of yellow and leaf green.
And yeah, it’s about as bad as it sounds. The whole thing looks like the circus came to town and promptly vomited on my journal pages. It’s so gross, it’s actually hilarious, even though that nagging perfectionist-voice in my head scolded me with, “This is what happens when you just jump in without planning ahead!”
So tonight I’m going to prove that scolding voice wrong by bringing this entry back from the brink of disaster. I’ll muck around with it and add some layers of paint and text and damn it, I’m going to get it to work. And if I can’t? Well, no big deal.
While waiting for paint to dry or inspiration to strike, I’m also going to continue priming a lot of old sketchbook paper I’ve had lying around, getting it ready to draw and paint on before turning it into collage elements. I might also get around to playing with some of the stamps I’ve made.
Carving rubber stamps has become my TV-watching activity, and since they’re so easy to make I’ve really been cranking them out. To make the stamps themselves, I’m finally using up a sheet of Safety-Kut I bought at least a decade ago. I think I bought it with the intention of making block-printed Christmas cards, and somewhere around here I still have a couple of packages of unused blank cards and envelopes.
And if that’s not old enough, I’m also working on a hand-made postcard for someone on Postcrossing, using blank postcards that are over a decade old. On the package I scrawled the address of someone I used to know in San Francisco–a city I left more than thirteen years ago–and I can remember her giving me her address before I left. Out of a package of twenty, I still have sixteen left and I suspect that at least two half-finished cards are buried in a box somewhere.
And to make things even crazier, some of the sketch paper I’m priming is about twenty years old. Back in art school, and for maybe six or seven years afterward, I had a terrible habit of buying sketch pads in different sizes and bindings, using maybe the first dozen pages, then abandoning them. I had this insane idea that if I just found the perfect sketch pad I’d have less of a struggle with my art. My dissatisfaction with myself and my inability to communicate as brilliantly as I wanted to ended up projected onto my materials, and the result is a copier-paper box full of abandoned sketch pads.
I still haven’t found the Platonic ideal of sketch pads. However, these days I manage to be content with the 8-1/2 x 11″ spiral-bound kind (the smoother the paper, the better). It may take me a while, but I manage to fill up every last page with sketches, writing, something. I finally understand know now that it’s me, not my materials, that’s at fault when every last mark I make makes me want to scream in frustration. I’m aware of my mental blocks now, in a way I definitely wasn’t when I was in my late teens and twenties, and can deal with them, now. So while I have a ridiculous amount of old, unused paper just sitting around, there is finally a chance that it’ll all be put to good use.
