Ah yes, the timeless collage... The intimidation of millions of possibilities... the inescapably lenghty process of cutting, pasting and finding meaning in the mundane, soul to the shiny, creativity in the colorful, and dreams in the dirty. Collage is so... hard. I think I struggled with it because you're starting at square zero with raw material, but it's not blank... it's already been assigned a certain purpose. It's up to you to re-arrange and consequently, re-assign that purpose, and you have no excuse not to.

I mean seriously. It's not like you can say "I don't have the skills/material/balls to collage." If you've ever attended preschool, you can collage. The trick though, is infusing these mountains of scrap paper with meaning, above the ones they've already been given... and no one ever taught me THAT in preschool. Hmm. Maybe this university stuff will be useful after all, eh? ^__-

Anyway, the first one is 34>12 : I took the numerical aspect of the title maybe a little literally at first, illustrating one pumpkin, opposing an insane group of them... But I thought the image also became more of a "the power of 1" thing after a while as well, illustrating isolation, fear, but also power with the belief in oneself, when faced with adversity. (Taking myself too seriously again? Maybe.)

The second is "I want to fly": I used a flying fish as a metaphor, when I realized that one of the pieces of paper I'd torn resembled something vaguely aquatic, so I went with it. It's jumping off the confines of the page, escaping the structured, confined symmetry of the lower half. My artsy-fartsy friends and I used to joke around that I was a "symmetry whore", and you can see it here... I like having symmetrical values of color, and the black bars balance themselves out, creating a very ordered, calculated sort of "fish tank", from which the colorful, lively fish is trying to escape.

The third is "monkey": This one I took sort of literally at first, exploring the whole "hairy" aspect of our primate cousins. I tried to use very sketchy, chaotically patterned paper, and ripped the images of a guy who had quite a lot of stubble on his face, as well as a chain around his neck, simulating captivity, like perhaps in a zoo of some kind. Then I realized: Hey, this guy's just a monkey like the rest of us... And when you deconstruct the features of all humans, the resemblance is not so far off at all.

The fourth in line is my self portrait: It seems a little obvious, as that is a distorted image of myself... But you don't get more "me" than that. I like blue, swirling, organic lines, symetry and lots of negative.............(space).

Anyway... I'll be posting the rest soon. ^_^