cut the cards

One of my aims is to get back to making collages in 2018. My favorite blogger, Hanna, has proposed to challege herself in 2018 by creating 365 Collages and a number of folks are considering supporting her by cheering her on and/or by doing a 365 Project themselves. It seems like a good project for me, too.  I can get a bit of daily art practice, and maybe a bit of writing practice too by posting my progress.

I'm usually not very good at these lengthy challenges, but I have a different strategy this time. Almost every day I work on the crossword and Sudoku puzzles in my daily newspaper. I intend to treat the collage practice as just another daily puzzle. I'm not sure how how it will work, but it will be interesting to find out.

I've been searching my closet, desk drawers, and boxes of clippings to find any papers or cardboard that might be suitable as a base for collage. I was thinking of doing square collages, as they are out of my comfort zone, but I found pieces of cardboard here and there already cut to my usual 4 1/4 x 6 inch postcard size, so I'm going to compromise and cut paper for both  5" squares and 4x6" rectangles. So far I've cut enough paper for about 3 months' worth of collage. The two piles are way back at the top of this photo.

Normally I use flexible cardboard from cereal boxes for collage, but usually those collages are being mailed. Since this project is mostly for myself and will be more like a practice, I'm using anything I can find that can withstand glue and/or paint. I have some really thick cardboard, old envelopes, parts of catalogs, rejected postcards, watercolor paper, and even some magazine pages cut to size. I'm finally using papers from old experimentss and papers that have been sitting unused in boxes for ten years or more. I'm hopeful that using some of these materials will declutter some of my collection of "stuff".