Jumping In...

"Sometimes you just have to jump in without your floaties!" I overheard a little girl say on the Disney Channel this morning... It was supposed to be the heart-warming scene from one of the million sequels to one of the many movies where a big fluffy dog saves the day, and then his family saves him.... or something....

Well.... I need to jump back into my art without "my floaties"... I'm back in Midland, and I want to get back to work... I want to make stuff and finish stuff... but I feel blocked... I don't know where to start, and I get anxious that I'm gonna make a mistake..

I think, by using Photoshop and Illustrator and other computer programs over the years to make collages and art, I've gotten really used to the "UNDO" feature.... or going back in history and changing the image back to how it was...

But, *sigh*, in art (without computers) and life, there is no "undo" button... I just have to put something down, and see how the medium reacts and then respond... Basically, not expecting anything, but responding to each layer, and watching the piece come together, instead of trying to make it a certain way.

This is what I wrote in my journal yesterday:

I just need to put it down and respond. The ideas of things do me no good just rolling around in my head, unless I try them and put them down. They don't all have to be perfect... There's no magic pill.... Just got another idea --pill, angels, light--... I just need to take the stuff I've got and use it... stop worrying about the end result

So, I'm jumping in... No floaties! I've got one collage I'm working on... it's from a picture I took in Terlingua and played with in Photoshop, and then I printed it on tissue paper.... and hot wax collaged it on to a page from an old Encyclopedia of Animals page on Condors... I burned the background paper a bit with my heat gun while I was trying to get the wax even.... looks cool... smelled BAD!