Art Hangups or Slap Together School of Art

Happy Spring Y'all!  It's been an unseasonably warm week and is now cool and gray outside. But things are blooming and Summer seems once again possible.

I have been taking a clue from you and trying to create more art. My collage art sometimes gets too tight and too "perfectionistic," in which case it ceases to be fun and I don't make anything for long periods. My time after Christmas is usually a dry, non productive time. But I want to create and I want to keep up the momentum when I do! When this happens, I revert to the Slap Together School of Art. I created the "school of art" to help a hung-up-on-perfection friend, and it works for me too.

Cleaning out my studio in January, I kept kicking around a piece of cardboard that seemed like a perfect junky tag. I looked at it for a couple of months. I watched Diane Knott making those lovely tags every day and actually won a runner-up gift on her give-away. It was filled with sweet tagable scraps and clips, pieces of lace, and ribbon. I started with a small piece of background paper, a magazine card rose picture, printed out a sweet sepia girl and the piece started to come together. My idea here is to stop obsessing and just glue it down. So I did. It came out pretty cute. I call it "The Key to a Pretty Girl's Heart.

The next two were fun--little birds you gave me were cut out and placed over sheet music with feathers and flowers, On a roll~

I realized that the point of Slap Together is to not measure and cut too much, but to tear and distress everything I could. I like the wallpaper-type prints over the distressed cardboard. It reminds me of old lath and plaster under crumbling wallpaper. That brought me to make The Traveling Salesman using clip art from my blogger friends and an old picture from my family album. I found a train ticket and postcard picture in my ephemera and hung it from a Tim Holtz chained clip. As you can see, I make up little stories about them as I go along.

But my favorite so far are Sophie's Choice and Dear Edward. Don't you think they were made for each other?  The flowers are a little modern but I like the contrast to the distressed background.

Art is evolution. I think I will keep this up for a while. I like the raggedy ones the best. What do you think? Shall I keep slapping them together?  My goal for April is to open my own Esty shop. You will be the first to know when.  Stay tuned, dear friends!