Tag Archives: digital collage

New technique alert

Much of creative discovery is propelled by laziness — or at least in my case, it is. It’s not that I mind performing lots of discrete steps or putting in the time (sometimes an obscene amount of time, I might add), it’s that I don’t always love some of the individual steps — for instance, gluing shit down.

Enter the scene: 8 1/2 x 11” sticky paper designed to be fed into an inkjet printer. Oh, am I psyched about this!

Step one: rip and cut collage elements. Place on blank page. No glue. Photograph.

This is as ephemeral as you can get, by the way, because by the end of this process, this arrangement will no longer exist. Digital record only. Do I mind the curling edges and the shadows produced by them? Sometimes. Sometimes not.

Step two: run photo of unglued collage through a bunch of filters using dianaphoto app.

My favorites below combined the collage and a photo I took of very weathered wood — perhaps a window opening to a slave cabin? I don’t remember. Using the “roll the dice” function for shuffling images in dianaphoto means I don’t always recognize what comes up and, having 13,000+ pictures on my phone, I don’t necessarily want to track down the source (see laziness, above).

Step three: select one photo of a layered collage and print onto sticky paper. Trim and stick to sketchbook page.

Step four: pillage elements from original collage (remember, nothing was glued down) and adhere them to the print/layered version.

I have trouble getting the interface between my phone and printer to do what I want it to, so I often just go with what comes out. In this case the slight change in scale served the design.

PS Sometimes I use the app “whitagram” to add a white border around an image so that when I print it, the image is smaller. In this case, I didn’t.

PPS The photo of the weathered wood was taken with the app “Hipstamatic” which applied the off-white faux paper photo border and also muted some of the color.

Maybe I’ll try to find the original after all. But first, it’s shrimp scampi for lunch (inspired by Melissa Clark’s cooking video on NYTimes cooking app) and then I’ve got to bake Za’atar Parmesan Pinwheels (same app) for a 75th bday party tonight!

The two female faces showed up in an earlier collage, some filtered versions below.

Dog, collage, and cream biscuits

Someone looking guilty
Someone looking on with avid interest
Someone ready to go outside after licking the cutting board
PCC collage made when I couldn’t sleep last night
The prompt this week is the woman’s face

Hope my American friends had a tasty and relaxing day! We were four and it was really nice. I learned you can always make something else (oh? Bourbon-laced sweet potatoes? Why not! Cream biscuits? Sure!), thereby turning a meal for four into something more like dinner for nine.

I had a chance to test the Hockey Puck Biscuit Theory.

Previously, I have been embarrassed and annoyed that any time I tried to make cream biscuits for a holiday meal, they were epic fails. Hockey puck biscuits. While my more private baking adventures are not uniformly good, I often manage to produce tasty and flaky biscuits.

Until yesterday, I figured the tension and pressure of putting out a dinner for a crowd foiled my efforts. But yesterday, we were four. There goes my theory.

So what, then? A post-turkey oven is not hospitable? Sitting on a cookie tray for three hours jinxes the dough? Anyone? Maybe the cut dough needs to be refrigerated until oven-time.

I mean look at that thing! It’s practically two-dimensional.

Everything else was good, I’m happy to report including the cookies (talk about going overboard. I’d already made a pumpkin cheesecake).

It’s cold. It may or may not be raining. If not, it will be raining soon.

Lastly, I came upon two share-worthy creators this morning. The poem by Bernadette Mayer (below) offers a master class in the use of repetition and captures my mood of late. The collage artist, a 75-year-old woman living on one of the barrier islands along the South Carolina coast, takes my breath away. Some of her pieces are huge. Aldwyth.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49736/failures-in-infinitives

Drought in New England

Old map of my neighborhood

When I tried to type “drought” in the title just now, it auto-corrected to “fright.” Exactly!

We are finally getting some rain, but it’s been bad, really bad — super hot and dry. Even that hardiest of perennials, the hosta, has struggled. I’ve dug up four shrubs and will likely have to dig up two more. Ferns have crisped and collapsed. Astilbe try valiantly, but barely make it despite daily watering. I’ve even been watering well-established trees for fear of losing them (NB: our reservoir, the Quabbin, has high levels right now).

It’s been a close-to-home wake up call for an area relatively immune to the drastic effects of climate change. Hurricanes are rare here. Tornados happen now again, but usually out by Worcester or Springfield. We don’t get flooding or wildfires and until now, drought was something that happened out West.

A dogwood that I planted at the elementary school years back doesn’t look like it’s gonna make it

A “flash drought” is nothing like the nearly decade-long drought in California, say, but it brings immediate consequences.

I read that a temperature change of 1.5 degrees would be catastrophic for forests in the Northeast.

This is not autumnal turning

No wonder some nights I feel the acid bloom of fear just as I’m dropping off to sleep.

Adding space

I used to work bigger more often. This smallish tower quilt was getting a rest pinned to the back of another quilt and I decided, after looking at it for a day, that I liked it with a surround of brown.

I went looking downstairs, fully expecting to have to make a substituon, but I found the very cloth!

Bigger surround wd allow yellow roof. Yeah or nay?

It is going to be hot today. Dog walk was sweaty. K has his five-year colonoscopy midday and of course he needs a ride. Because of the Covid numbers, I will wait outside. Hope there’s a patch of shade.

And below find yesterday’s collage results (some of them). Feel free to skip if you’re on Instagram!

This is Paris Collage Collective visual prompt for the week
This one is not a part of the series
Look for the fedora. It represents the rise of theocratic surveillance. The birth collage speaks for itself I hope.
Original birth collage made in 90’s, when I was, you know, giving birth.
One of the weird residual attitudes of having been raised Catholic is a lasting affection for all things Mary. In my universe, she is allied with the Divine Feminine and not Christianity.
Mary’s hand is a helping hand.
Yes, that’s Jeremy Irons. One layer here is another paper collage featuring the actor and paper doll losing her head.

Pics and a little sound

“white women’s tears”

We walked in the woods today. The frogs were LOUD.

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/2VmI6Srd/img_4890.mp4

Next door neighbor’s yard crew showed up for the first time this season today. After asking them to take their ladder off of my Rose of Sharon sapling near the curb, I retired to the basement. Two leaf blowers went on and on but I didn’t care. My new plan. My sanctuary!

Cleaned out three bins of fabric, worked on D’s quilt until I ran out of bobbin thread, and made this little collage, above.

The initial three-house black and white was a gelatin print made with a cardboard and onion bag resist.

We just had an early and simple dinner: grilled cheese sandwiches and leftover soup. For real sustenance, we listened to Biden’s speech from this morning.