Collage Your Life: Techniques, Prompts, and Inspiration for Creative Self-Expression and Visual Storytelling

Requiring nothing more than paper, pen, scissors, and glue, collage is a highly accessible craft that offers a myriad of possibilities for creative self-expression and visual journaling. Artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski combines in-depth technique instructions with dozens of inspiring examples and prompts to assist crafters, artists, and creatives of all levels in developing their own personal style of using collage to create distinctive memory books, journals, and records of daily life experiences. Requiring minimal equipment - just scissors, glue, paper, and pens - collage is an accessible craft that offers limitless creative possibilities. Like meditation or journaling, making collage can be an avenue for self-reflection and artistic exploration. In Collage Your Life, artist and teacher Melanie Mowinski teaches a variety of core techniques including lettering, stamping, stenciling, transfers, and adhesive methods, and provides dozens of prompts to jumpstart the creative process and encourage crafters to explore the versatility of collage, such as: make a self-portrait; disrupt your routine instincts; incorporate text; assemble mementos from a trip; process anger or anxiety; collage with others; or try creating block-out poetry with pages from a magazine. Inspiring examples of the author's work along with that of other collage artists are featured throughout. Crafters, journaling fans, scrapbookers, and artists alike will find guidance and support for developing their own distinctive collage style, whether the goal is to create a visual record of daily experiences and special occasions or to expand a creative journaling practice. AUTHOR: Melanie Mowinski is a professor of art at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and founder of PRESS: Letterpress as a Public Art Project. She has maintained a daily practice of collage and creating with paper for more than 10 years. Her artist books are part of special collections at the American Library at the Smithsonian, Haas Arts Library at Yale University, and the Tate Modern Museum of Art in London. SELLING POINTS: . Requiring no special materials or skills, collage is appealing to crafters, paper enthusiasts, scrapbookers, journal keepers, and anyone looking for a simple way to stretch their creativity and engage in art-making . From creating a memory book for family or friends to expanding on a daily journaling practice or creating art with scrap paper, the examples, prompts, and techniques equip readers with all the skills and inspiration needed to explore the full range of possibilities collage offers and develop their own unique style . Creations from the author as well as a wide range of other collage artists and journal-keepers showcase the amazing variety of styles and approaches the medium invites