Read the diary of a hobbyist.
Below are a series of my personal reflections on collage as a practice, and process.
So much for a hobby that's not cerebral!
So far, it's not my preference to plan things out beforehand.
I was drawn to collage as a meditative practice. Part of wanting a tactile hobby was also wanting a way to give my brain a break. I enjoy the process of flipping through my "prefab" collage kits, finding stickers and swatches that speak to me, and slapping them together on the page of my circus notebook. It's sort of like a zen garden; collage, for me, is like dragging a rake through sand. Except, I imagine the best sand artists plan out their zen garden layouts and patterns beforehand, too.
Minimalism vs. maximalism: balancing blank space and battling perfectionism.
The first few collages I made are so thick with content, the media is layered. There are stickers covered by different stickers, paper glued over wonky angles and scribbles (I also tried incorporating pen doodles and writing, and didn't care for the look of it). There's something freeing about being able to cover up "mistakes" with more collage, in a way that improves the collage.
This website project has been an extension of collage making.
I picked collage as the topic for this project because I wanted something not at all wrapped up in stress or worry. It ended up drawing a beautiful parallel to the process of creating this site as a whole.
Where do I go from here?
It's all about experimentation, now. I want to keep learning, and playing. I want to draw new concentric circles in my garden. I want to try planning everything out before I glue everything down, and I want to try creating a collage I then tear up and incorporate into a new collage. The possibilities feel endless, and that is incredibly exciting.