Negative Space Collage

May is a new month so the theme on the Documented Life Project has changed to texture so this month is going to be all about tactile elements.  The prompt for this week was fabric and the phrase was “the fabric of your life”.

I am not a textile artist, not remotely, so I neither have the skills or the material for incorporating fabric into my art journal.  If you have followed my blog for long enough you might recall that my last foray into using fabric was when I used my husband’s discarded underpants to make pyjamas for a hibernating bear.  It was fun to create and certainly amusing but I  decided not to repeat that experiment.  So I interpreted the prompt more broadly and decided to construct fabric from a non-textile medium.

Using a piece of scrap photocopy paper as my substrate, I used clippings from magazine pages to construct a long dress and hair for a female figure.  I then used a craft knife to cut out hands and a face so that those features became the negative space within the collage.  When I glued the whole piece into my art journal, the white of the journal page became the hands and face.  As someone who loves to draw and tends towards illustration, I had to resist the impulse to draw in the fingers and the facial features.  Whether that would have improved the whole piece or detracted from it, I don’t know.  Feel free to offer your opinion.  I swithered over it for so long that I ran out of time (having given myself half an hour for this DLP page) so the blank negative space became the default.  It’s an experiment at least.  I did some line work with paint pen on the hair and dress just to give both a bit more definition.