I am one collagin’ fool. I probably enjoy collaging the most because I don’t have to be perfect. It also gets me going creatively at the art table, since I usually work on compositions and color schemes. I have a collection of really old, damaged, and should-have-been-thrown-away-because-there-might-be-some-kind-of-slime/moss/virus-thing-growing-in-it-from-the-seventies books laying around in boxes! I have always wanted to venture in them and cut out and/or photocopy some of the images but have never done so. Why? is a good question. Well, that answer is simply put, I am a-fraidy cat. For some reason, I can’t seem to get a grip on using those images, with the poor quality photography and printing.

Until now! HAHAHA! I jumped right in the other day, after spending some time on flickr, looking at all the collage groups and gathering some mental notes from my other collages. I am going to challenge myself and step out of my own little mixed media box and start mixing these vintage images with new magazine clippings, my own drawings, and other crazy techniques and media.

The collage I made was a mixture of images from The Color Treasury of Crystals, pics from Bazaar magazine, and my own graffiti bubbles. I want to call it “Saved by the Bubbles” because I literally cut, glued, and tore this bad boy up at least 3 times. I threw it in my trash can more than once! I finally put bubbles on it and they always make everything okay. I posted some “in-progress” pics to show you the before and after. The original collage was about 18” long and now it’s only about 11” so you can understand how frustrated I was. In the end, I do like it. It’s nothing like my other collages and it has some neat colors and images in it. Please tell me if it is a keeper or not?