OhJoySexToy

Daily Collage: December 12 - 19

Added 2021-12-20 00:45:07 +0000 UTC

Sunday, December 12: Grateful for naps.

Bed frame for napping, lavender for feeling good n’ relaxed on the bed for napping, pretty green and gold background for dreaming while I’m good n’ relaxed on the bed for napping.

Monday, December 13: Grateful for embroidery.

My neighborhood is full’a those little library boxes for people to deposit and acquire pass-me-down books and magazines. Jan Brett was my favorite artist as a kid (hers was the first name of a living artist that I learned!) so finding her classic book The Mitten in one of my neighbor’s boxes felt like a special gift meant just for me.

…the kind of gift you cut up and nail through. WITH LOVE. To plot out my hole-y path, I sketched a couple different possibilities on tracing paper and then I went ahead and hammered through the fatest nail I could find.

There’s a reason why I save containers full of bits of string and ribbons and elastic cords, and that reason is: I might need them someday. It may take years, but eventually I do need a random bit of pretty garbage-twine or a single shoelace, and on those days- bam! I am set.

Tuesday, December 14:

Grateful for video calls.

This was somehow the only picture of a smartphone I found in my magazines, which does read fairly clearly here but I’m afraid you can’t really tell in my finished piece 😬

Originally I was looking for multiple people either working out or socializing, interacting with each other, since I use video calls to either A) workout with my friends/classes and B) just fuckin digitally hangout with my friends while we make meals or work in a puzzle or whatever. But. Then I saw this picture and I was like: that vibrance, that energy, that I’m-alone-but-I’m-busting-on-the-phone-with-someone-on-the-other-line-ness? Perfect.

I got a little fancy with this one and cut her so her feet and head actually overlap the frame of the phone which, again, is a bit on the nose as far as symbols go (we’re separated but we break across the distance through our phones, yes, I know: groooooooannnnnn) but, hey, I yam what I yam (an on-the-nose visual artist)

Wednesday, December 15: Grateful for taking breaks.

Like any other self-employed millenial living under capitalism in the 2000s, I’ve got pretty complicated and unhealthy beliefs about “letting” myself “rest”. Uhg, I’ve got this whole shpiel I’ve repeated to my therapists and friends about privilege and surving and self-worth and blah blah blah.

“How can I justify taking a break when so many others don’t have that luxury and they are working so much harder, doing more difficult jobs than me?”

Life’s not fair and nobody feels a difference in their own life whether I work myself to another nervous breakdown or let myself rest. So. Rest, if that’s an option. Rest and be grateful for it.

Thursday, December 16: Grateful that I pressed all those leaves in 2019.

Look! It’s the negative space of the hands from my one collage about secondhand shops last week!

I started collecting and pressing leaves as an exercise I learned in Space Camp and the DBT program I went through afterwards. These are my leaves of Learning How to Mental Health.

Friday, December 17: I didn’t make a collage today and that actually works out just fine because I am living the gratitude of my Wednesday piece, which is grateful for taking a break.

Saturday, December 18: Grateful to have my creative brain that gives me ideas to make cool shit.

Creative Nature Crafts is a book from Goodwill ($3) that I picked up just today because it had great photos of neat objects and plants and so so so many hands using artistic tools in its step-by-step tutorials.

I sliced along the natural hair contours so the hands could poke out from them, like they were comin’ straight out of her head.

That green wrapping paper has been in my paper scraps box for literally years.

Gold halo to help the collage figure pop against the green paper background.

Something I actively like about myself is that I do have a creative mind. I see regular objects and automatically think of ways I could turn them into other things, ways to embellish them, was to combine them with other things into a more elaborate piece. I like making things, I like assembling these real world puzzles on the fly. I like that part of my brain.