New Skills

As a kid, I used to trail behind my mom in fabric stores, content just to run my fingers along the bolts as I passed through the stacks. Now that I think of it, this tactile attraction is probably why I'm drawn to collage, especially with thick, crumbling, torn vintage papers.

Cloth, paper, glue, you name it. If it has texture, I'm going to touch it. So you can imagine I've never been much of one for digital collages.

But yesterday, working on a mock up of a design for a collage illustration job, I scanned a few old book pages to work with and decided it would be easier to manipulate them in Photoshop than to do all the printing, cutting, transferring, and gluing that's required in the actual collage.

Uh ... wrong.

I was at the computer for hours. And I have a new-found respect for digital collagists.

I can't show you the image for now, but these snippets give you an idea of my (simple) new skills. It was fun, frustrating, enraging, easy, confusing, hair-pullingly annoying, and interesting.

I'd never have gotten this far without my personal cheat sheet, i.e., several phone calls to my good friend, the multi-talented Tim, far away in St. Louis.

If my design gets approved, I'll create the actual collage by hand. I still love the weight of paper, the creation of shadow and relief.

But there's definitely more digital play in my future.