...One Of My Favorite Things To Do
One day when my daughter was little, I asked her what she'd like to do, and she said, "I think I want to gluen something." If "glue" was the noun, then "gluen" had to be the verb.
I suggested that we both sit down and "gluen" together, as I had already spent much of my life gluening. In college, daily sketchbooks were required as idea books. Mine were filled with sketches that morphed into collage as I glued-in objects to remember for color, shape and over-all design.
All that glueing in college brought back childhood memories, since when I was little, every magazine in the house made it into my room on its way to be discarded. What my scissors didn't find first, eventually ended in the waste bin. The good parts were snipped and "gluen" into little books made of signatures of folded bond paper, stapled in the middle. The thing I remember most about these books is that every inch was covered with images. None of the original paper ever showed through. That was just my 4-year-old style, and in a lot of books, it continues to this day.
After college and to this day, everywhere I go, I carry a purse-sized journal, usually hand-bound with a wide variety of papers making up the individual signatures. The sturdier papers are treated with acrylics. Watercolor and other absorbent papers are treated with watercolor and/or sumi-e. Every page is drawn on, doodled upon an written on, and the thinner pages and pages where the paint and ink have bled to the opposite side are treated to multiple layers of collage, both as cover and as reinforcement. I have worked this way for years. Ask any mom who has seen me waiting for my kids in ice arenas, dance studios, coffee shops, playgrounds...you name it. They'll all remember me as the lady with the sketchbook, pens and glue.
As little as two years ago, this was practically unheard of, although there were a handful of us doing this. Now it is emerging as an art form in its own right.
Kelly Kilmer teaches a wonderful little class called "swatches". It's impossible to describe this class accurately because there are so many subtle elements presented in the course of it, that any description will leave out the key word, which is "more". But basically, it's about learning and practicing the subtle art of combining collage elements on a micro scale, but as I said, it is more--much more--than that.
Lisa Vollrath has had a wonderful yahoo group for years called "gluebooks". This is collage-meets art journaling-meets mixed-media. Anything glued down is fair game, and it's fun, and fast. I love Lisa's gluebooks because for me, they are a cross between the books I "gluened" when I was little and the swatch journals that I collage today.
The two pages above are taken from my purse-sized journal featuring the letters "A" and "B"...24 more to go!
Right now I'm:
Settling into the long weekend
Listening to "The Joint", Sirius/XM's reggae channel
Getting ready to gluen another page or two,
Watch a few episodes of NCIS, then
Finish the book I'm reading and start a new one
Have a great day, Everyone!
