have glue stick, will create

There's an art form out there called 'gluebooks.' I'd never heard the term until I signed up for an online collage class at GreenPaper. She offers a gluebook class, so I went and looked at the flickr album of past classes. It appeared to be collage distilled to it's most pure form - paper and glue.

A quick search yielded a Yahoo group, so I signed up and when I got the first digest of messages, there was a list of current 'challenges.' One of the was the Blindfold Challenge, where you close your eyes, open a magazine at random and tear out three pages. You then proceed to make a gluebook page with inly the stuff on those 3 pages.

I figured for my first attempt, it might be wise to have some guidelines, so I grabbed an old Country Living (figured I could hardly go wrong with that LOL) and ripped out 3 pages. I should have taken pictures of them but roughly, they had an image of a fireplace with decorated mantle, the lead page of an article on persimmons, three men on a porch holding pumpkins, and some misc text.

The mantle image grabbed me right off, so I glued that to one side of a spread in the little journal I decided to use as my 'challenge' book. I kept looking at the pages, clipping out words and phrases and smaller images, then trying them out on my pages until I liked them. I glued it all down, then added a few more bits here and there.

Conclusion - I really enjoyed the constraint of having only those 3 pages to work from. I think it helped me to focus, instead of leafing thru endless magazines in search of more, more, more. So, the left page is the mantle with various words that give an idea of what the image means to me.

I've never actually had a black mantle but I quite like it. The black frames with B&W images work for me too.

The right side of the spread is much busier. The background is strips torn from the 3 pages. In the center is one of the guys holding a pumpkin, only he's upside down. The text strip on the far right was some sort of antacid, I think. It's upside down too, so you don't accidentally read 'acid reflux' when you're supposed to be enjoying the collage!

I liked the house and the chandelier. The words 'comfort zone' were perfect cause that's what my house is for me.

Anyway, it's my first gluebook effort and I'm pleased with it. It's pretty much free - old magazines, a glue stick and a journal or notebook from the dollar store. Plus, just sitting down and cutting and pasting is a blast. It's like 2nd grade when you didn't have a care in the world except whether you had good stuff in your lunch and if Walt Disney was on that night.

Anything that can make me feel like that in this day and age, you can bet I'll be going back to again and again!

Blindfold Challenge