a stork collage

Sometimes I like my practice drawings so much I can’t scrap them. But in the meantime I’ve drawn and painted and scribbled and dripped ink all around them. I usually cut out the pieces I like and then wonder what to do with them. My desk has a cut out of a DC scene, a coffee cup, a pumpkin.

And a stork.

What I like to do with them is collage. I have had this stork sitting around my desk for a while and decided to try to pull together a collage. I like the lines a lot, even though the paper had no bleed.

I put together the other pieces, using a scrap of rust-colored paper, a small piece of paper with my stamp, and finally some hand-made paper I made last summer at a Japanese paper-making workshop at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD (I highly recommend checking out their classes; they even made the 2013 Reader Poll for the Washington City Paper for best art classes). The last piece, the hand-made paper, was one of my first attempts — the rough edges and inconsistent thickness show that I am a novice at the practice. Still, what I like about the results is that it looks sort of like melting snow.

The words are a haiku I wrote:  Spring slouching / from winter’s slumber / nests await!