Collaged Journal Page I Made Last Week

I made this collaged journal page last week.

My original intention was to make a large collage (7x10.5 inches) which would later be cut into artist trading cards. I was open minded at the time to also using paint, ink and rubber stamped images combined with this ephemera.

To begin I opened a box of ephemera which I had been saving. I like to reuse junk mail and random ephemera used in my daily life to make artwork and artist trading cards, when possible.
The stuff at the top of the box had a bunch of papers which I instantly recognized as being from the first two weeks of June. There were papers from a conference I attended, a hotel key folder from that excursion and a parking receipt for an amusement park I went to with my kids and a bunch of friends, for example.

As I began to make the collage I realized I was not using the pieces in creative ways but was just making a collage of the items. When it came time to layer over some of the pieces I didn’t always want to do it as I felt I was covering up things that documented our family life in those two weeks. I then decided to have this collage be a journal page of those first two weeks of June.

If you look over the page you will see places I went and things we did, things we ate and even some of what was on my mind that week. There are pieces of letters I received with mail art, postage from books I received that week from PaperBackSwap book swaps that came in the mail in that time, and even two pieces of the diet food wrappers of a diet that I was on for a total of three weeks in June.

This was fun to create and took just over an hour. I also sorted through the papers I’d saved and threw away those which were not worth keeping for future art projects. So this was a little decluttering and little art making.

I plan to make more pages like this and to bind them into a journal when finished. For now this is being stored in a plastic sheet protector inside of a three ring binder.

Unresolved issue: I need to figure out what product makes a good sealer as parts of this have Golden Acrylic Gel Medium on the exposed surfaces which, depending on the weather/humidity in the air, can be very tacky and stick to other surfaces.

Technorati Tags: art journal, collage, ephemera, collaged journal page.