I wish I was halfway done with this already.
I’ve said that to my mother and Kevin so far, and neither of them quite understood what I was talking about until I babbled about it for a minute or two and they picked it up, probably more through their hard-won Ursulapathy (Ursulamancy?) skills than by any coherence on my part.
The hard part of a collage piece is starting.
At least for me.
This is the only place where I suffer the much-vaunted tyranny of the blank page–I have no idea what I’m supposed to put down, and I usually default to strips of torn book pages or manga because it at least gets SOMETHING down, and then I can build on top of it, except that sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I just have a blank page that happens to have manga on it. Sometimes I’ll glue down two elements and stare at them, and they will continue to be two elements of nothing much attached to nothing in particular. Whatever peculiar alchemy turns them into something isn’t happening yet.
The books on collage and mixed media–I own a number, often with the vague hope that I’ll find the one with the page that says “You, Ursula Vernon, this is what you are supposed to be doing, right here, so pay attention”–suggest that you prepare a number of collage grounds so that you have them to grab when the mood is on you.
This is excellent advice.
Stupid past me, however, did not pay attention to this advice, and now current me gets to suffer, because gee, a prepared ground would be AWESOME right now, except I didn’t prepare one. (Curse you, past me! Did you really need to spend so much time milking the little cows in Harvest Moon? Why weren’t you making art?!)
Sigh. I want to be drawing birds or coffee cups or plague doctors or…something. My brain has some great ideas of what it could do if it just had a base to DO it on. It is halfway-through-collage brain. It is not starting a collage brain.
But I didn’t start one, so I’m left cutting apart dead prints and applying random scraps of art paper that were laying around the drawing table from where I trimmed them off something else, in hopes that if I just keep putting enough stuff down at random, something will finally click and become the thing I can do the thing I want to do on.
If that makes any sense.
