A Collage with a Squirrel

I haven't made many collages lately, so the other night I took out a glue stick, a pair of scissors, some 3x5 cards, and one children's magazine from the 1970s and one comic book from a few years ago. I worked on two little collages, the one posted above and an unfinished one with a cool drawing of a helicopter from the children's mag glued down for the background but nothing else so far.

Initially I was going to let the quizzical-looking man in the illustration have the speech bubble, but then it seemed best for the squirrel to speak instead. I think I was inspired to include the squirrel (and have it appear larger than the man) because my dad has been at odds with squirrels for several months now as they ate up a good portion of the corn in his garden this year, and they continue to bury peanuts all over his yard and then dig holes all over the place as they try and find the peanuts again. (If you're reading this and you're my dad's neighbor lady who has been feeding the squirrels all those peanuts, please stop!)

By the way, this collage also draws inspiration from a technique I learned from my friend (and collage teacher!) Wendy. You cut an image from a magazine that covers the entire surface (the base or substrate) that you're using for your collage (in this case, an index card), and then you just add one thing to that background. So I started with the tree/green background, and then I added the guy. In a class I took with Wendy, we'd just stop there: one background image, and just one thing glued on top of it. For this collage, I added two more things, one at a time: the squirrel and then the speech bubble. I like this slow approach to making a collage.

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