Nice: looking at a pretty picture.
Nicer: your own picture [no guarantees about it being pretty].
This exercise will have you forming relationships with totally inanimate objects, you just wait and see…
Tear two colorful pages from a catalog or magazine. More colors are better.
Use a paper cutter or a pair of scissors to cut the paper into strips, then 1″-ish squares. The size isn’t all that important.
Start arranging all the pieces on top of a sheet of white copy paper.
As long as you’re not recreating the pages as they looked before you cut them up [you sneak!] any arrangement is fine. Just try to organize them in a way that’s pleasing to you.
Once you’ve got all those squares laid out on the paper, move it aside [don't mess up the squares, leave them as they are] and get a new sheet of copy paper. You’re going to fill this paper with squares but none will overlap [see photo below]– this version will be an iteration [another version] of the first sheet of squares.
This means you’ll have to choose individual squares from the first sheet and glue them down in a neat, linear grid. Look at the first sheet, choose a square that most looks like the area you pulled it from, and glue it down. Repeat.
Here’s what you’ll find– you start to form a relationship with the squares you pull off the first sheet of paper and attach to the new sheet. Is this the right square? How does it look with the one I just glued down?
I highly doubt that your finished project will look glamorous, or make sense to any unwitting bystanders, but this was an exercise in process.
It’s one thing to see something and get a great feeling, but the idea here is to actively engage in the process of making something. Because we knew from the outset that the final project is unlikely to be a thing of beauty, it’s a heck of a lot easier to let go of preconceived notions and enjoy the process.
I hope this gave your mind a little 7th inning stretch.
[Postscript: When I was posting this I noticed I must have used the reverse side of the 2nd catalog page-- I don't see those pillow colors anywhere]
Tags: creative thinking, scissors and glue, try it