Daily collages

I mentioned on January 1 that my new daily art project for 2013 is to make a collage every day, and now that it's well into the second month of the year I thought I would bring you up to date.

I decided to set few rules for this project, because I had no idea where it would go and didn't want to constrain myself before I realized what was happening.  Because I was away from home the first week of the year, I decided to take the minimum of supplies and to work small.

I am blessed with a huge supply of library card catalog cards, gleaned when two local libraries pitched their paper files and went all-digital, so I grabbed a handful and stuck them in my bag with a scissors, tweezers and glue stick.  I also brought a date stamp and stamp pad, thinking that this would be a good way to keep track of the collages as they accumulated.

As it turned out, I really like the 3x5" card format.  It's small enough that the collages can be simple, and not take a long time.  Not sure I am ready to amend the rules for the whole year, but at least through February I am going to stick with the cards as my supports.  Sometimes I paste onto the blank back side; other times I like a bit of the catalog info to peek through.

And I like the date stamp.  So far I've used it on the face of every collage and I plan to stick with that practice at least another month.  I wish I had a smaller stamp, one like the librarians used to use back in the ancient days when they actually stamped a book card and the empty envelope pasted inside the back cover, but at my local stationery store the stamps come in one size only.  Date stamps are clearly on their merry way toward obsolescence.

I'm finding most of my images in the newspaper, although some of them have been cut from the catalogs and junk mail pieces that have showed up on our table.  The matte finish of the newspaper seems to work best in the crude, hasty compositions that I'm making, even though you do get annoying showthrough on some of the lighter areas.

Last year I allowed myself a day's grace period for finishing my daily stitching, since sometimes I was too busy to work on the project.  Upon reflection I realize that I prefer to work without a grace period.  Since my collages are taking less than half the time that the stitching did, I have decided to enforce the strict rule: make the collage that very day, even if that means just before I go to bed, after the heat has been turned down.

I'm a real beginner when it comes to collage so I'm regarding this year's daily art project as more a learning experience than a cumulative work of art, as I have tended to think of past projects.  I think that by the end of the year I will be a lot closer to finding my voice in this new medium.  Meanwhile I'm just enjoying myself.

If you want to see all my daily collages, I'm posting them to my new blog, Kathy's Daily Art.   That blog also documents many of my previous daily art projects, as well as my continuing weekly photo posts.