I believe I’ve mentioned a time or two that I like to color things. I have a collection of colored pencils and a large book of mandalas ready to color in. I find that coloring calms certain parts of my brain that tend to get overheated by Looking at Screens, but I also need to be mindful of how long I focus on a given page, as hyperfocusing is generally Not a Good Idea for me these days.
Anyway, for your viewing pleasure, a mandala melange. (Yes I am a Libra sun and the visual aesthetic is everything!) Viz:
If the top left one looks vaguely familiar, that’s because I detailed its “evolution” in my Notes. I’ll be doing more of those in the future.
Before I got into coloring, Collage was my main mode of artistic expression. Collage allows my nonverbal parts to speak through the “language” of Image. I have made collages in all shapes and sizes and for various reasons. A favorite thing I do is to create “illustrated storybooks” that combine writing and collage. I’m currently working on one of those to document the past few years; that will be shown off In Times to Come. For now, I present some of these smaller collages I’ve been doing in my planner to fill space.* Again, Viz:
*Certain materials have been redacted because I’m also a Scorpio Rising who likes her privacy.
I won’t have collages for March, June, September, or December because they have no spare space, as it turns out I use the full allotment of planner pages for those months.
My source materials: various cards, stickers, magazines, and catalogs, the latter two especially from Design Toscano, Pacific Trader (I think? the memory is a bit fuzzy), Pyramid Collection, and TV Guide.
I enjoy cutting out images that have one context and assembling them in a totally new context. I’m sure the therapists in the Substackverse would have a field day analyzing some of my work, which might or might not show up in future posts… ;-)
So pretty!
Lovely images. I'm also a scorpio rising, so well done for the redactions.