Week One: Gather

I cannot resist a challenge.
When Carla invited me to join her soulcollage group this year, using the book: SoulCollage: An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups, fear struck me in the centre of my stomach...me? Collage? eeeeeek...I have never done this before, and collage is (I feel) one of my weaknesses.

At first, it seemed like just a fun new challenge for me and I love a challenge, something new to get my 'teeth into', to throw myself into body and 'soul'...like I do with my blog.

Then the book arrived and I suddenly thought 'Hang on a second, you don't actually know what you are doing here!' Did I really want to even attempt this huge commitment, as I now saw it?

I guess the answer was 'yes' because here I am. My intentions now are to:

a.) have fun

b.) maybe learn some new things about myself

c.) learn and practise a new process in art

d.) grow

After a lot of pondering, even worrying, hesitation and dithering, I decided to jump in feet first.
Life has often thrown me many curved balls before, and this looks like it could be a great learning one for me.
I invite any of you who are interested in this to join me, you don't need to be experienced at all, not even artistic, just eager.

This is the space/table I work on in the spare bedroom.On the wall in front of me is some of my own art with lots of the art I have received from my bloggy friends which inspire me and fill me with happiness every day. It is light and airy, has a view of the back garden and the huge sky outside, which looks like this today.

I started a week or more ago, looking, sifting, sorting, finding, tearing, snipping and became completely engrossed in this simple process. Now I drive everyone mad, begging, asking, for and taking newspapers and magazines wherever I find them.
While gathering images, I discovered a few things. Firstly, and mainly, I am mostly attracted to bright images...but then I realised that I am was also looking for more subtle, paler and undertsated images...hence the two sides of my personality. The most important thing I realised at this stage is that certain emages 'talk' to me and that's gotta be a good sign.I now have quite a big plastic container filled with pictures and images of all sorts. I decided to put them into plastic folders in sizes, so that I could just take out a folder at a time to look through, whenever I need it (my attempt at being organised).


Here are a few images randomly thrown together...and viola, here is my header!

Thanks Carla, I am quite excited now. This may be just what I need to get me out of my Winter funk! I have invited lots of my bloggy friends to join us on this new adventure, so I hope some of them respond.