Making Collage Cards
Magazine collage, layer by layer
Glue stick in hand, I’ve been creating constellations of meaning on old holiday cards.
“Collage is like a hall of mirrors. Every direction you look, you see something different and visually stimulating” — Nita Leland
This week: ⭐ December Layering ⭐ Illustrated Journal Glimpse ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts ⭐ Special Offers!
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📌 December Layering
1.
I stood in front of a set of bookcases a few weeks ago, taking in the shape, the texture of spines and titles, and idly looking for something to cull, a way to lean into the quiet dismantling underway. Most days, I turn away from the shelves, confused, unable to find a thread I can untangle, a crevice that will become a handhold.
The shelves have silent mapping, some chronology, some theme, and some resonance with one or the other of us, although mostly these shelves carry my echoes.
2.
I was standing in front of the shelves where I am least present when I spotted a bag of holiday cards, leftovers from multiple years combined in one bag and wedged on top of a random stack of books and a small wooden toy toolbox holding old bottles of acrylic paint. (That was the fingerhold for culling, but I didn’t see it that day.)
Seeing the unused cards, I had the fleeting thought that I could transform them, use them as the base for simple magazine collage, and send them out with December greetings. It was an unexpected spark, a small tactile idea that lit up something inside of me.
3.
Even though I don’t typically work in collage, I routinely sit and tear out pages from old magazines, keeping images I might want to draw and salvaging anything with an interesting texture or palette and any words that jump out. I have piles of torn magazine pages.
This year, I’ve been circling collage, looking for inroads that mesh with my projects and for a way to satisfy a desire to simply play with the arrangement and juxtaposition of scraps, clippings, and fragments.
4.
Thinking about collaged cards, pastiche, the layering of found objects, and the quiet accumulation of meaning, had just enough texture and resonance to linger. It seemed doable. I didn’t envision making dozens, but I thought I might collage and mail an intentional few.
I held onto the idea, turning it over now as then as something I needed to start.
5.
As with most of my projects, I started randomly. I started without worrying about finding the perfect pile, identifying the perfect piece, or creating the perfect tapestry. By the time my mother arrived for an extended holiday visit, the dining room table was covered in pages torn from magazines, small clusters of clippings as I sifted for color and tone, and a pool of words, the literal text and texture to bring the cards together.
The piles of headlines and single words are enchanting. They read like small found poems or spine art: a wild harmony, creatures of habit, shine, new light, stilled life, curated with care, good morning, design your own story.
6.
As we started our daily December puzzle, I pushed the clippings to the side, clearing a space for me to fit the pieces together and let the winter scene take shape. Each night when I finish my part of the puzzle, I sit arranging and gluing fragments from magazines onto the surface of cards we never sent.
There is something soothing in the process, in the simple arrangement and infinite possibility of color, line, and word to create a whole.
7.
The cards are concrete and tactile, the shuffling of papers, the sorting, moving pieces in and out of place, and the stickiness of glue.
The process echoes how I approach writing, how I approach the work I do in my illustrated journal, and how I move through each day, gathering fragments of memory, moments observed, and questions pondered.
Laying these artifacts together and looking at them from various angles, sometimes with a magnifying glass, sometimes with a prism, sometimes with glasses off and the blurring of aging eyes softening and fuzzing the edges is a process of making connections, of mapping meaning, of seeing the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate things, and of appreciating both the detail and the synthesized whole.
Illustrated Journal Glimpse — Week 50
Sunday’s portrait was quiet, a woman with downcast eyes buttoning a gold-toned shirt, linen. Quinacridone gold in the foreground was literal and symbolic, simultaneously a retreat and a step forward in a threshold debate I’ve been circling with color, my pages, and the feeling that I’ve misplaced a thread.
Looking Back (same time year over year)
2024: A Tree of Paper Cranes
2023: Holiday Letters and Fruitcake
Illustrated Journal Prompts
Made It?
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Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.
Amy, I don’t know how you do it. All that work with paper and you still come up with an involved, involuted—wonderful—posting. I have piles of mending and quilting that I just can’t seem to get to. And I don’t think my writing is a careful as yours.
I’d love to collage. Maybe in another universe. Meanwhile, I’m trying to knit a dishrag.
The tactile ritual of sorting and gluing fragments really captures something deeper about how we assemble meaning from disparate pieces. I especially dig the idea of treating old cards as a readymade substrate instead of blank canvas. I've got stacks of magazine tearsheets sitting aroud and this makes me wanna finally use them for somthing intentional instead of just hoarding inspiration.