I'm working on three The Grand Tour collages that take our intrepid travelers to the sky, sea and jungle. Definitely, not the requisite Grand Tour itinerary. It's been about six months since I did a piece in the series. As time goes by, the collages are getting larger, which presents a new set of challenges in terms of composition. I'm playing with scale on these, juxtaposing smaller and larger images to create the illusion of depth.
The jungle collage, now on the work table, has greenery composed of a vintage poster, an antique hand-colored botanical print, and a wallpaper sample with an antique map about the world's forests as the background. The "sky" is a feathery/leafy sheet of marbled paper printed in Australia that was a gift to me. I've been wed to that sky from the moment I pulled it out of the bin, but now that the collage has been photographed and I can view it on the computer, well, I'm not so sure it's the right sky.
I was already thinking about cropping the bottom of the collage to put more focus on the three travelers, and seeing the photo confirmed it. This means losing a lot of that beautiful map, along with the marbled paper. I was convinced that the marbled paper would fill the entire background, and was getting antsy, so I glued it to the mat board. Permanently. Gulp. I did the same with the map, gluing it over the marbled paper.
We'll see where this ends up. Meanwhile, I've learned the value of patience and will simply tack things down before making a final decision. That way, invaluable papers - such as that Guyot map - won't go to waste. Well, back to the studio ...
