Yesterday was a day full of making art, and I’m still behind. That is wonderful!
The marvelous fact about registering for Sketchbook Revival is the flexibility of the program. Karen Abend puts together an intense schedule of workshops with two a day. However, she gives registrants access to the videos for a week or two beyond the event so everyone can work at their own pace.
The Day 5 Session 2 workshop was “Watercolor Collage Fodder” presented by Tiffany Sharpe (tiffanysimplysharpe.com).
I’ve heard fodder referred to as ephemera as well.
Tiffany breaks her collage work into two parts. The first part is the creation of fodder of all types. When she has a pile of materials (not necessarily related) she proceeds to the second part—composition.
For the purposes of this workshop she combined the two.
There is a lot going on here, and from your perspective quite a bit of it will make no sense at all because there was fodder that briefly appeared on the page and then was removed.
This was another collage I did not like as a whole.
The bits I did like:
The mushrooms were fun.
I am a collector of ephemera.
Last night I went to dinner at my friends’ house. While we were snacking and hanging out, I pulled out my pen and pocket notebook and drew the flower arrangement on the table.
This morning I added watercolor, a bit of cloth from the dog groomer, some scrap construction paper, and an idea, and made a different collage in my altered book.
I think the large format of my sketchbook has been working against me where these collages are concerned.
Both of the instructors for the sessions have used smaller format pages for their collages, and in the hour or less timeframe, a few key elements can combine to fill the page.
What I have not liked about mine is they feel incomplete, and the compositions haven’t been coming together overall.
Solution: If there is another collage session, I’m still going to work in the big sketchbook, but I’m going to frame the piece from the very start. Probably a horizontal frame placed on the page in an asymmetrical manner. Hmmm, maybe I won’t wait.
But I have more sessions to do! This is a nice problem to have.
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