50 collages

I sat down on Wednesday night to start working on our assignment of creating 50 collages. I spread out my papers before me and wondered where to start. I had picked my theme and had a few ideas rolling around in my head, but when I sat down to work I was a little stumped. I would find photos that kind of depicted my theme, but then that wasn't really collage. Then I thought I could cut out chunks of color and paste it down on my board to represent what I was thinking, but I'm thinking that's way too slow, isn't this an exercise about getting ideas down and working with them to find things we want to pursue? I sat there depressed, staring at the few things I had cut out, not really feeling good about putting anything I had together. I was also thinking that doing it this way will take every moment I have and then some to get to where I want to be with this. Plus, why should I spend time doing something I'm not happy with? I would definately quit most of them before I was half way through because I know they're not worth pursuing.

Now what am I going to do...

I went to bed thinking about it and sometime during the night came up with my plan. I would take index cards and a sharpie pen and sketch ideas. This way I could get many of ideas down on paper without putting a lot of time into any one of them. Then I could go back and find the ones that had the most potential and develop them to the next level. Maybe even take the best of the best and carry them even farther. It seemed like a plan.

Thursday night I was waiting for friends to show up at a resturant where we had planned to have dinner. I got there an hour early hoping to have some time to myself to start my sketching. So there I was in the back corner with a glass of wine drawing on index cards. My method was to just start putting pen to paper, getting the shapes down; as soon as one was "finished" flip it over and start the next one. Put just enough down to capture the idea, not worrying how sloppy it was, just keep going. If the idea felt good, I knew I would probaly come back to it later and work with it again, if the idea was bad, no problem, not much time invested.

I finished about 30 sketches in the 45 minutes before dinner and did another 20 on the bus this morning, it feels like the right way to approach this. I'll probably do a few more on the way home tonight and then look at them all and decide which ones I want to explore more and spend more time with on Saturday and Sunday.