BLOOM - my collage is finished!
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Talk about on fire lately! I have been so creative and I just LOVE it! I think it’s safe to assume that I have got my depression medication on the right dosage now. 
So, I worked on my collage today and I finished it. You remember - it looked like this and I was rather stuck and unsure last time you saw it:
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Well it doesn’t look like that any more! Now it looks like this and it is called Bloom:
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I took on board a couple of suggestions (Anna-Maria suggested height which I hadn’t thought of and was a really good idea, and Flora thought if I named it that might help in the direction of the piece) but the biggest practical help and inspiration came from Teesha Moore’s site. She has some scans of her amazing art journal pages which were great to see but she also had a very helpful article on how she journals. If you are interested in doing an art journal then have a look here for some practical info.Â
In her article, she talks about the layers of her collage pages: first layer is a watercolour wash over the blank paper, then she collages some images - this was exactly where I had got up to before and then got stuck. I just worked out that it was three weeks ago! I didn’t know what to do next but Teesha told me and it worked for me!Â
So what is the next layer? Crayons! This was fun. The magic words from her article were: “the crayons help incorporate your collage into your page rather than it just sitting on top, looking like you have just stuck it down” and it’s true. This really worked - and of course once you do some scribbling, it all starts to fall into place more. For her journal pages she leaves areas to fill in with writing later, and she suggests that you do the art and writing at different times and places as the two activities are so totally different. She is partial to writing at a coffee shop or bookstore cafe.Â
So anyway, once I started the crayon work it really started to come together and I got the idea of using flower and tree imagery. I remembered the suggestion of height and then I spied a bubblewrap-coated envelope that happened to be sitting right on top in my rubbish bin next to the table I was working on.  I had a brilliant idea to stamp some flower and leaf images onto the envelope and then I cut around the stamped images and stuck them down and voila! Height! With the smaller flower shapes (I used a paper punch for those) I used one of those 3D adhesive dots in the middle. Here it is again - ha!Â
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My first collage and it took a while to get done but I am happy with it and have learnt a lot along the way. I would do some things differently next time - eg. have a better idea of what I wanted it to look like before I started (though allowing for it to change and come into being as it comes along) and pasting a layer of old book pages onto the cardboard to cover it before starting so that the whole look of the piece isn’t stuck on being largely brown.Â
See it larger for more detail here. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Also, I’m not sure what to do with it now. I suppose put it on a wall.Â
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"Bloom" collage - finished on Flickr - Photo Sharing! Said,
Sunday, April 23, 2006 @ 11:45 pm
[...] I finished my collage! My first collage and it took a while to get done but I am happy with it and have learnt a lot along the way. I would do some things differently next time. See it larger for more detail here. read more about this here: http://www.jenleheny.com/archives/186 [...]
mary bogdan Said,
Monday, April 24, 2006 @ 2:10 am
Hi, thanks for showing me your work, or should I call it works, because there are many pieces and many layers in this one collage…. very busy and very active… I think you can look on this piece and maybe make ten more just from the influence and experience of this one art work…. bravo!
Let see a series….
m.
Joy Said,
Monday, April 24, 2006 @ 10:30 am
The finished collage looks great. What size is it? I can imagine it framed in either a 50’s style timber frame, or one of those chunky Ikea Ribba frames, in the dark brown(if they still make them in that colour.) Well done!
Nicole Finlayson Said,
Sunday, April 30, 2006 @ 3:39 pm
Oh wow I am LOVING this Bloom collage. So much colour and movement, it reminds me of running through the garden on a Spring day - divine!!!!