Collage Your Life

Requiring minimal equipment-just scissors, glue, paper, and pens-collage is an accessible craft that offers limitless creative possibilities. Like meditation or journaling, making collage can be an avenue for self-reflection and artistic exploration. In Collage Your Life, artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski teaches a variety of core techniques including lettering, stamping, stenciling, transfers, and adhesive methods, and provides dozens of prompts to jumpstart the creative process and encourage crafters to explore the versatility of collage, such as: make a self-portrait; disrupt your routine instincts; incorporate text; assemble mementos from a trip; process anger or anxiety; collage with others; or try creating block-out poetry with pages from a magazine. Inspiring examples of the author's work along with that of other collage artists are featured throughout. Crafters, journaling fans, scrapbookers, and artists alike will find guidance and support for developing their own distinctive collage style, whether the goal is to create a visual record of daily experiences and special occasions or to expand a creative journaling practice.

Requiring nothing more than paper, pen, scissors, and glue, collage is a highly accessible craft that offers a myriad of possibilities for creative self-expression and visual journaling. Artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski combines in-depth technique instructions with dozens of inspiring examples and prompts to assist crafters, artists, and creatives of all levels in developing their own personal style of using collage to create distinctive memory books, journals, and records of daily life experiences.
Contents
• What Do You Love?
Chapter 1: Build Your Materials
• General Tools
• Materials
• Building Blocks of Design
• Composition
Chapter 2: Develop Your Techniques
• Collage Building
• Other Techniques
• Low-Tech Printmaking
• Text
• Fabric, Feathers, and Found Objects
Chapter 3: Make Collage a Practice
• Begin, Again
• Find Your Voice
• Translation
• Patience
• What Holds You Back
• Go BIG
• One Size Does Not Fit All
• How to Change Your Mind
• Who or What Guides You?
• ASK
• Disrupt
• Play with Memory
• Find Your Antlers
• Use Your Hands
• There's Never a Perfect Time
• I Know, I'm Ready, I Can
• Self-Portrait as Mirror
• Let Your Light Shine
• It Is Solved by Walking
• What Yes Comes from No?
• Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
• Envision
• Embrace Fluidity
• What Passes through Your Hands?
• Find Forgiveness
• Revise or Censor?
• Useless Anxiety
• Wander
• I Don't Have to Do This, I Get to Do This
• Deliberate Practice
• Join a Challenge
• Strength Is Subtle
• Collage with Others
• Face It
• Open for Fun
• Walk the Line
• Build Slowly
• Accept Solitude
• Wait without Thought
• Only Connect
• Wilderness Mindset
• Send Some Mail
• Find Kindness
• Make the Most of Boredom
• Come Alive
• Tap the Power of Enthusiasm
• Focus on What Is Right
• Love Everything that Gets in Your Way
• Delve into Your Dark Nights of the Soul
• Reframe Negativity
• Show Up and Get to Work
• Let the Light Shift
• Follow Your Intuition
• Work Expands to Fill the Time
• Create Accountability
Chapter 4: Create the Container
• Making Your Own Collage Books
Reading List