long tall skinny collage

wow!! can i just say right up front that you are the best bloggy cheerleaders.....ever!!! you have no idea how much i appreciate you waving your creative pom-poms.....all of your encouragement and great collage tips were SO helpful and i can't thank you enough!! i put together some collage pages last night using some of my scraps and some of the wonderful bits of happiness that i won in a giveaway from tess several months ago! some of the pages look a little unfinished because i decided to leave some white space for future journaling....and i can always go back and add all kinds of fun stuff to the pages once i get my writing filled in!

and here's what the pages look like inside the book! julie calls this second book in her class the "long tall skinny", and for good reason....it measures almost 12 inches tall!

for the covers, i used a piece of favorite paper that i've had in my stash for quite a while....just waiting for the perfect project (i would love to have a journal filled with fabulous little watercolors and ink spots like this!). and i thought that this piece of repurposed black leather would be the perfect finish for the spine.

i learned a lot this week....about collage and about myself. thanks for sharing the journey with me! :)

torn papers

i've got all of my supplies out, ready to make book #2 for julie prichard's class. the pages of this book will be collaged, and i must admit this is awkward territory for me. i've collaged in the past and it wasn't what i would consider to be my most favorite art memory. it was so bad, in fact, that my teacher suggested that the only way to salvage what i had was to tear my finished collaged sheet into lots of smaller pieces, giving me about fifteen smaller collages to go home with (instead of the original one collage). not good. my grid-oriented-must-have-rules-and-structure brain just doesn't process directions like "just tear some paper and glue it to the page" very well. i absolutely adore the look of collage, but my problem is that i overthink projects like this. but i really want to learn new techniques and experience life outside the box, so, okay, here i go....i'm off to tear some paper (does it have to be a certain size?!) and glue it (not too much glue, i'm guessing) to the page (anywhere i want?) oh yes, and to avoid the overthinking part, i'm turning the brain switch to "off" mode. right. now.....