Collage Challenge - #1

How is everyone doing in self-quarantine? For me, it's not a significant change as I love being at home holed up in my art room creating! (My husband, who is just the opposite, is already experiencing cabin fever and withdrawals from sports!).

I've been browsing for some fun challenges to inspire me and keep me creating during these surreal times and I found a 2020 ongoing collage challenge on margaretemiller.com that sounds interesting.  I love collage and doing them often helps to improve your skills. For this challenge, five prompts plus one bonus are uploaded each week and you make a collage using the prompts. The bonus is extra if you want to use it and can also be used to replace one of the other prompts. I decided to follow along. Since this challenge is already in its 12th week, I will just do the weekly prompts either daily or whenever I have the time and inclination.

I am going to create these in this very old Hampton Arts stamp catalog which I picked up at a trade show years ago. I kept it since it is coil-bound and has nice, sturdy pages. It's approximately 8" square, so large enough to get several images on and small enough to not be too overwhelming.

This is the cover which I will collage at a later date.

And this is the first page - before I started working on it.

This is my completed collage. The prompts were: 

1. something that represents time (I used the clock image from a magazine and the stamped time quote)

2. something that blows in the wind (the paper on the left which has seed pods and leaves)

3. threads or a piece of fabric (I forgot this one, but used the bonus instead)

4. an animal (the elephant on a piece of old scrapbook paper as well as the horse on the long, vertical postage stamp)

5. something out of the recycle bin (part of a paper bag on the right side, a piece of food wrapper - striped, and a small scrap of kraft packaging)

Bonus:  postage stamp (I used two - I added the prompts on the underside of the large stamp in the upper left corner)

I'm assuming you can use other items and images to bring your collage together or at least I will be doing so. I added some vellum leaf stickers and a Tim Holtz butterfly.

I had fun with this. It's amazing that you can take unrelated images and tie everything together. This is certainly not my most favorite piece ever but I think it works. If this sounds interesting to you, go check out the link above and join in!