Collage Your Life - Techniques, Prompts, and Inspiration for Creative Self Expression

Piece Together Your Story
The simple craft of collage can be a powerful tool for daily self-reflection, a creative visual diary, and a fun way to enhance your journal writing or scrapbooking projects. Melanie Mowinski offers techniques, ideas, instructions, and 55 distinctive prompts to get you started. Jump into the joy of the process and use it to explore your life, stretch your creativity, and express your unique perspective on the world around you.

Inspiring examples from more than 50 artists

List of contents

Contents

• What Do You Love?

Chapter 1: Build Your Materials

• General Tools
• Materials
• Building Blocks of Design
• Composition

Chapter 2: Develop Your Techniques

• Collage Building
• Other Techniques
• Low-Tech Printmaking
• Text
• Fabric, Feathers, and Found Objects

Chapter 3: Make Collage a Practice

• Begin, Again
• Find Your Voice
• Translation
• Patience
• What Holds You Back
• Go BIG
• One Size Does Not Fit All
• How to Change Your Mind
• Who or What Guides You?
• ASK
• Disrupt
• Play with Memory
• Find Your Antlers
• Use Your Hands
• There’s Never a Perfect Time
• I Know, I’m Ready, I Can
• Self-Portrait as Mirror
• Let Your Light Shine
• It Is Solved by Walking
• What Yes Comes from No?
• Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
• Envision
• Embrace Fluidity
• What Passes through Your Hands?
• Find Forgiveness
• Revise or Censor?
• Useless Anxiety
• Wander
• I Don’t Have to Do This, I Get to Do This
• Deliberate Practice
• Join a Challenge
• Strength Is Subtle
• Collage with Others
• Face It
• Open for Fun
• Walk the Line
• Build Slowly
• Accept Solitude
• Wait without Thought
• Only Connect
• Wilderness Mindset
• Send Some Mail
• Find Kindness
• Make the Most of Boredom
• Come Alive
• Tap the Power of Enthusiasm
• Focus on What Is Right
• Love Everything that Gets in Your Way
• Delve into Your Dark Nights of the Soul
• Reframe Negativity
• Show Up and Get to Work
• Let the Light Shift
• Follow Your Intuition
• Work Expands to Fill the Time
• Create Accountability

Chapter 4: Create the Container

• Making Your Own Collage Books

Reading List
Resources
Materials and Inspiration
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index

About the author

Melanie Mowinski is a professor of art at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and founder of PRESS: Letterpress as a Public Art Project. She has maintained a daily practice of collage and creating with paper for more than 10 years. Her artist books are part of special collections at the American Library at the Smithsonian, Haas Arts Library at Yale University, and the Tate Modern Museum of Art in London. She lives in Williamstown, MA. 

Summary

Requiring minimal equipment--just scissors, glue, paper, and pens--collage is an accessible craft that offers limitless creative possibilities. Like meditation or journaling, making collage can be an avenue for self-reflection and artistic exploration. In Collage Your Life, artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski teaches a variety of core techniques including lettering, stamping, stenciling, transfers, and adhesive methods, and provides dozens of prompts to jumpstart the creative process and encourage crafters to explore the versatility of collage, such as: make a self-portrait; disrupt your routine instincts; incorporate text; assemble mementos from a trip; process anger or anxiety; collage with others; or try creating block-out poetry with pages from a magazine. Inspiring examples of the author's work along with that of other collage artists are featured throughout. Crafters, journaling fans, scrapbookers, and artists alike will find guidance and support for developing their own distinctive collage style, whether the goal is to create a visual record of daily experiences and special occasions or to expand a creative journaling practice.
 

Foreword

Requiring nothing more than paper, pen, scissors, and glue, collage is a highly accessible craft that offers a myriad of possibilities for creative self-expression and visual journaling. Artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski combines in-depth technique instructions with dozens of inspiring examples and prompts to assist crafters, artists, and creatives of all levels in developing their own personal style of using collage to create distinctive memory books, journals, and records of daily life experiences.

Additional text

“With sharp scissors—and an even sharper imagination—Melanie Mowinski shows us that the joy of collage comes from nurtured serendipity and playful hands-on experimentation.” — Janine Vangool, editor of UPPERCASE magazine
 
“In Collage Your Life, Melanie Mowinski demonstrates how expansive the artform can be, and how the portal to discovering its magnitude includes sincere presence and observation. The book's thorough presentation of methods and prompts will lead readers to varied and compelling paths of expression through the wondrous world of collage.” — Jenny Doh, artist and former Editor-in-Chief, Somerset Studio
 

Product details

• Authors: Melanie Mowinski
• Publisher: Workman Publishing
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.06.2022
• EAN: 9781635863567
• ISBN: 978-1-63586-356-7
• No. of pages: 224
• Subjects: Guides > Hobby, home > Creative design; Humanities, art, music > Art > Interior design, design; Handicrafts, decorative arts & crafts, CRAFTS & HOBBIES / Mixed Media, CRAFTS & HOBBIES / Upcycling & Repurposing, Handicrafts, decorative arts and crafts, Other graphic or visual art forms