Sometimes I start a collage in my diary but then I just let it sit until it tells me what else it wants. (This one was started around Christmas.)
Blexbolex’s Ballad
If you’re lucky, the overlap in the Venn diagram of books you love to read and books your kids love to read is more than a sliver.
Blexbolex’s Ballad is a mysterious little book. Starting with a simple, 3-page chapter about a child who walks home from school (“The school, the road, home.”) the second chapter adds a page in between each previous page (“The school, the street, the road, the forest, home.”) and the author continues that pattern for 7 chapters, eventually culminating in a story of over 50 pages.
There’s a wonderful post over at Picturebook Makers where Blexbolex talks about his process:
The trigger of the form was firstly my stay with a group of artists working on comics in an unconventional way: OuBaPo. One of the exercises captured my imagination. It involved inserting one square of a comic strip between two existing squares, thereby diverting the narrative ellipsis towards another one. Then a meeting with a group of children gave me the real key to the book. They were playing a game where whatever path they took, they always got to arrive home.
The OuLiPo-inspired hijinx would be impressive on their own, but what’s truly amazing to me is that for a book that feels so analog and textured, almost all of the artwork was done digitally:
The images for the book are purely digital. Only three backgrounds on paper (two with pencil and one with ink wash painting) were scanned in to allow me to add substance to the shapes drawn on the computer.
This process makes the book something that feels both ancient and futuristic, or rather, simply out-of-time.
This post is the first in a new Bookshelf series in which I’ll be sharing one of my favorite books every Saturday.
Scraps into poetry
While many writers are turning to the calm of collage as an escape from needing words, Hanif Abdurraqib is turning to self-collage and assembling his leftover scraps into poetry:
[I am] recycling my way toward a feeling of productivity. I copy and paste email responses that work across multiple inquiries. If I don’t feel up for making a morale-boosting lunch, I pile some leftovers into a bowl and hope for the best. I’ve found myself doing this with poems, as well. Piling leftovers onto the page and seeing what makes sense. I don’t throw away drafts of my poems. I keep them all in a folder on my computer. If I cared for something enough to write it, I care for it enough to imagine that it might be useful later.
About once a week, I’ve been digging through my folder of misfit poems and constructing new ones out of them. It’s like a joyful puzzle. The work of writing is already done. The work of arrangement is where the excitement is.
This is a fine method for artists of all kinds. A little hoarding goes a long way. You never know when a discarded scrap from something can be turned into something new. (Keep Going contains a whole section that didn’t fit into Show Your Work!)
Sticky note collages
In my never-ending borderline-OCD quest to never waste anything and make something of my by-products, I’ve started keeping a pad of sticky notes on my desk and when I have unused scraps from my collages I add them to a note. Eventually the note becomes its own collage, sometimes more interesting than the “real” collage I was working on. (The note above was made while tidying my desk and talking to the friend on the phone.)
Something you can live with
I’m an imperfectionist when I’m working, so I’m usually puzzled by perfectionists and their problems.
“I figure I’m going to be living with this song for a long time,” says Weird Al Yankovic, in regards to his painstaking process of crafting parody lyrics. “We’ll probably be doing it onstage for the rest of my life. It’s got to be right.”
I like this argument for craft, especially for books. Make it good enough that you can live with it for the rest of your life! Or, if that’s too much (and it is, really) make it good enough that you can live with it for at least the next couple years while you hawk it…
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