Tag: Creative process

Evolution of a Collage

September 30, 2025

Dear Liza,

I needed to make a cover for my new Journal, and I wanted a collage. It’s a good size, 9x 12, so I had plenty of room to play with. I found a heavy tag backing from an old watercolor tablet to use as my base.

First, I pulled tons of colors and images from my collage boxes and Jennifer Coile’s gift of museum calendars. I trimmed them and laid them down, seeing who played nicely and who didn’t.

This is always a long process with lots of internal dialogue. I will make a decision to include a piece… in this case, that impressionist woman, and it takes a long time before I admit that it’s just not working. She was both getting lost and cluttering up the picture.

So, in goes the Egyptian hippo. Better, clearer, more focused. Still too many images. Pull them out. But where do the flowers go? Up, down? More discussion.

Every piece is chosen, placed, stared at, accused, forgiven, moved and shifted.

The last bit to be decided was the sun ( or moon). I wanted the blue to balance the bright hippo, but it looked too heavy. The circle cut from a rejected paper worked well, and the blue triangle set it off.

When I had stared more, had lunch, looked again and still liked it, it was time to glue it down. I went in sections, the top stripes together first, but not to the base paper.

I glued the hippo and flowers together, but not down yet. This makes placing the focal points less nerve-wracking.

When I was finally willing to commit, it all went together quickly. UHU glue stick, tweezers (so my fingers don’t get so gluey) and voila! Done!

After dinner I came back to admire it, and realized it wasn’t done yet. It felt stagnant. I decided to sleep on it.

By morning, I realized it needed a bit of movement. Again reaching for papers that had been put aside, I punched small dots and used a piece of string to figure out the line I wanted, and glued them down.

Now it was done. A coat of Mod Podge for a top coat and all was ready! Once it was dry I used Mod Podge to give a good adhesion between the heavy tagboard and the original, floppy journal cover. Under heavy books for a few hours, then out to finish drying, and it will be ready by the time I need it.

And this concludes our tour of the creative process.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Thinking it Over… and Over…

Dear Liza,

As you can tell, I’ve become a little obsessed with this French map quilt.

I’ve never made anything like it, and the examples I’ve found on the internet aren’t anything like I’m trying for, so I am in untested waters.

Quite literally, because it is the shorelines that are giving me the heeby-jeebies. I am trimming, staring, and questioning myself at every step.

After Auntie Bridgett pointed out that for the shoreline to look right it would need water, I headed down to Joann fabric to fetch some blue. And she was right (as she so often is). The shorelines of France curve in, so they fit well inside my hexagonal outline. But what shape should the waves be? Classic pointy? Or smoothly waving?

Since this is an interpretation of a map, we are imagining it from above, and the pointy wave shape is what we see from alongside the waves.

So I am going to go with the smoothly waving style, and will add some embroidered lines of white and blue to show the texture and movement of the waves hitting the shore.


So, after more than a week of “The Artistic Process”, I have three of my six edges (those with shorelines) figured out. Next, I’ll wrestle with mountains.

Wish me luck!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Adding To My Time

Dear Liza,

A while back I showed you the start of a collage book in whichI will try and illustrate all the stages of life. For whatever reason, the first page I did was close to the end…

So I decided to go back to the beginning.

Choosing what to call the stages was my first challenge, but I went with my first inspirations. From Preconsciousness through Puberty to Oblivion and Joy, I printed them out and put them on the inside cover. Because I was sloppy, the page didn’t come out quite like I wanted, but it will do for now. The beauty of collage is that I can paper it over and do it again.

For my first stage of life, I started with Preconsciouness, when we are growing but not aware of anything yet. I got the images from a Time Life book called The Body from the 1960s and added some tissue paper and paint speckles.

I haven’t done “Comfort” or “Cognition” because I can’t see them in my mind yet, so the next one I have is “Organization”, when we are figuring out how people and things are the same and different..

As you can see, babies can get some things wrong. They might think butterflies are flowers, or that a stuffed dog is a real dog.

The next page is about learning to talk, with jumbles of words overlapping each other.

The next page I have (almost) finished is Mobility. I imagine this is what it must have felt like, balancing on our own two feet for the first time. A precarious, dangerous step that we all needed to take.

Those are all the pages I have done for now. This is a long term project and I work on it as ideas come to me.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Another Art Challenge

Dear Liza,

My friend Ruth Inman gave us another challenge this week. It was to use text as a background for a piece of art. She offered some pieces of text to use, but I wanted to do my own. I used some stencils that I just got last week and went over the letters in waterproof ink.

I got my acrylic paints and an old credit card and scraped some color over the words.


The greens and yellows are a good start….


One thing I really like about art, and the artistic process, is that you learn as you go along. If something isn’t right, you work on it until it is. In this case, the pink made it even more Spring-y, but was way too intense. The letters were fighting with the colors! Help!

Auntie Bridgett suggested I put some white outlines around the letters, which helped a bit, but not enough. So I darkened the letters with some watercolor pencil and lightened the red bits up with tiny dots of Posca marker. It was better!

I still need to work on getting my stencils letters straight, but that will come with practice.

Have fun with your art!

Love,

Grandma Judy