Apologies, but today I'm going to write about my adventures with collage - oh no, not AGAIN, I hear you say - but to be honest I'm not really doing any writing at all beyond journalism, right now, and if I go down that route, we're going to get to some very dark places very quickly, and right now - I'd rather not. It's hard enough doing it as a day job, and then lying awake all night thinking about....but no, let's talk about collage.
So, just a recap, I started doing mixed media collage in July 2023 when some lovely friends paid for me to do a short course at City Lit which is a college in central London offering all kinds of short courses for adults - if you've dreamed of doing virtually anything new, it's a great place to start. I was an utter novice in 2023, but loved it, and kept going all year - and then treated myself to the same course again this year. It's an intense course - 6-9pm Monday to Thursday - but I was keen to see what it would be like to repeat the experience, this time with a bit more knowledge of what I was doing.
Day one I got a lovely surprise - and a link to children's writing (At LAST!) - Penny Joelson, the very talented YA writer who teaches various creative writing courses at City Lit, was doing the course too. It was lovely to share the experience with her, and we set about cutting and sticking while trying not to talk shop about publishing.
We did various projects during the week, but the one which stood out for me - and the one which I can't stop making - was making collages with postcards. 'The rule,' said our teacher, the artists Simon English, 'is to just use one technique on each postcard. Just do one thing, and see how you can transform them.'
Now it so happened that I had a pack of postcards (ordered from Amazon) of landscapes. Perfect for this exercise. And I loved it. Here are some of the postcards I've altered on the course and since:
What to do with all my postcards? I've made 50 so far. I've photographed them all, and may get some printed up as - hmm - postcards. Some I've given to friends. And some friends have been roped into a new project - I send them postcards, they send me back unembellished cards representing where they live or come from or a place they love, and then I will combine them to make a bigger piece of art.
That last idea reminded me of my first book and how it started out as an exercise in another classroom - this one Amanda Swift's Writing for Children class at City University. We all had to create characters and then get into pairs and put our characters together into a plot for a YA novel. My character was a boy in witness protection, I paired with Amanda, and her character was a girl training for the Paralympics. She was kind enough to let me take her character into my book when I was excited by the plot we created, it was the first time I'd ever seen how a book might be made.
Postcards have two sides, of course. They're perfect for writing ideas on, or making character outlines. Not too big, or scarily demanding, able to be changed and embellished, stuck together and shuffled. Maybe that's another next step for me. Because I do want to start writing again...once I've made a few more postcards
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