Breaking out of comfort zones

Posted by
Jenn Greenleaf
Oct 2, 2006

I'm trying to stay away from random collages, but it seems to be what I always gravitate toward. I'd like to break out of my comfort zones this month and try some new methods. My confort zones are:

PAINTINGS: I always seem to do something with nature. It's always involving a tree and flowing grass. I don't know why, but this is the first thing my mind wanders off to whenever I work with paint.
DRAWING & SKETCHING: Same thing . . . I'm always drawn to things from nature. With drawings, though, it's flowers, trees and "country" elements (like an old bucket or something). Again, I'm not really sure why . . . it really quiets my mind when I work on these things, though.
COLLAGE: Even though I use random images and colored paper, my collages are still set up in a scrapbook orgnanizational manner. When I collaborated frequently on nervousness.org, I was able to manipulate different methods and styles successfully . . . but that may have been because I was working on so many projects at the same time. Perhaps I should try this multi-tasking this month to help break out of my collage comfort zone.

Beginning to break free a bit:

My altered books have been morphing into something new and different to me -- I've been using a lot of stencils (particularly on the borders) and, rather than a bulky "collaged/assemblage," they've been coming out more like that scrapbook organizational manner I described above. I've also been adding a lot of pockets, tags, cut-out's and envelopes. I like this twist, though, because I felt like my other altered book work didn't really tell the story I intended at the start of the work.

My ACEO (a.k.a. ATC) work has been changing, too. Before, I worked from card to card without really tying any of them together with a theme. Lately, I've been creating small series and exploring different themes and different materials. I've accomplished this "break free from my comfort zone" when I was cutting watercolor paper and saved the scraps. They were perfect for either an ACEO base or the interior mat. I used walnut ink, watercolor pencils, gel ink and other various materials layered one on top of each other. This was hard for me because anyone who knows me well knows I'm an obsessive compulsive freak when it comes to keeping things neat.