Weekly Warm-ups - Abstract Collage

Last week I decided [daily warm ups) to restructure daily warm ups in my art practice to see if I can overcome the obstacle of, well, not doing it. While I know intellectually that warming up with simple practice exercises primes the well and adds important practice and play time, I avoided warm ups more often than not.

So last week I tried my new approach, which is to assign myself weekly warm-up directions. That is, I choose a theme or technique to commit to exploring for that week for at least 15 minutes a day (and no longer than one hour). So I jumped right in and I assigned myself “abstract collage.”

 I think this structure of weekly assignments is going to work. And not because collage is one of my happy places and I just loved doing it. The simple act of determining a direction ahead of time makes it easy to start the creative day without having to think too much. Before I knew it I was in the zone—cutting, tearing, arranging…paper. As you see above, I created six different collage spreads with paper and glue.

 You might remember that I assigned myself collage with the intention to specifically explore bold shapes and lines, high contrast, use of repetition and a color story--elements in any kind of art that make me happy. I held focus on these elements while creating, and it seemed to help. I considered those elements as I made choices.

The one difficulty I had with the rules I set for myself is that it was really difficult to let it just be a warm-up and move on after a short period of time. Most of the collages above took longer than warm up time—and there at the end I fell pretty hard for those little compositions. I just had to work as long as it took to finish them!  

They are all drafty and unfinished as per my intentions for these warm ups…but oh, I feel so much potential for them. I am reminded that this kind of art making feels like me and I have much, much more exploring to do. That in fact, I need to keep going with these explorations.

 So it was a great first warm up week.

 This week, I would like to continue with collage but I’m going away for the long weekend (to southern California), so I’m switching my warm-up assignment to “urban sketching”—every day this week I’ll draw something outside from observation. This will be great practice and it will give me the opportunity to explore and draw.

 Meanwhile, I’m adding collage work into my growing list of art projects for post warm-up time when I return. Maybe if I  manage to keep my warm-ups actually warm-ups (short and sweet), I’ll have more time for that list.