Teeny Tiny Press by Amanda Laughtland

So I decided to spend some money on myself (a pretty rare thing--I usually only buy myself stuff like secondhand books and thrift store t-shirts), and I'm taking an online collage class with an artist named Randel Plowman. I first learned about his work a few years back from my friend Wendy who referred me to his blog called A Collage a Day . He has written a great collage exercise/workbook, too. And I just plain like his work, which is a good thing to look for in an instructor, I'd say. It's funny because I teach online classes all the time (really the only time I'm not teaching online is for a week or two between quarters), but I've hardly ever taken any classes online. In fact, I can only think of one online class I've taken (which was a class about how to teach online). It's cool to see how someone else teaches an artistic class in an online format. And I've been wanting to take an art class again--it's been several years since I've taken ...

I bought a little stack of vintage Hit Parader magazines on eBay some months ago, and I've been enjoying using them for collages. They aren't image-heavy, but they have plenty of bits of text to experiment with; I've used lines of text on my collaged greeting cards and also for found poems. The magazine used to publish the texts of popular song lyrics. There are some cool tiny images, especially in the ads in the back. Anyway, I've shared pictures that show of the results of me cutting up these magazines (collages, poems, etc!), but I can't remember ever posting a photo that shows an original "whole," so here's the cover of a 1953 issue of Hit Parader . I have another issue with Lucille Ball on the cover, and I haven't figured out the best thing to do with it yet.

After looking at some of my older work, I felt inspired to do some new collages with hay(na)ku, so this afternoon, I took out a little stack of 3x5 cards which I had started but not finished as collage pieces, and I added text to three of them. All of the text comes from a vintage issue of Hit Parader magazine I bought on eBay last year. Here's one of the images... And it turns out that I did more of those hay(na)ku collages back in 2010 than I remembered. I got to looking at my Flickr photostream and found quite a few. I added three new collages that I made today, tagged all the old ones, and put everything together into a hay(na)ku set on Flickr .

After many hours of commenting on essay drafts, I took a break last night and worked on some collage while Trish worked on some knitting. All this with The Simpsons on TV in the background, so you might say that all is right with the world. The text and central image are from old comic books, and the background is from magazine paper.

Today I finished grading the last of the first set of 75 essays I needed to grade for my three classes this quarter. I have two English 101 classes and one English 100 class. The English 101 students were analyzing photos; they could pick from this gallery I created using images from Flickr Commons (a very cool collection of photos from libraries, archives, and other institutions all over the world). I change up the gallery a bit from quarter to quarter as this helps eliminate plagiarism and makes the reading/grading process more fun for me as I get to read and think about different images. So the students got me thinking about photos, and as a result, I remembered to take my camera along when Trish and I went to the Arboretum for a little walk this afternoon. But then I forgot the camera in her truck when we got home, and she's asleep, so I'll have to post photos of autumn leaves in Seattle some other time. I'm still waiting for my books to arrive from Lulu. They shipp...

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 ...

This collage doesn't quite have a poem in it, or maybe it's just a micro-poem made of a single couplet. I haven't had much luck in directly combining poetry and collage, but now and then the intersections seem more direct as in this piece.

Made this little hay(na)ku card the other night with images and text from a Better Homes & Gardens book on flower arranging.

Often Replaced Originally uploaded by Mandy L. Of the collage/poetry pieces I've done lately, I like this one the best. The image is from a magazine ad I painted over with some cream-colored paint. This is collaged onto a piece of a cereal box, around 4x4 inches in size.

More text from an old Family Circle and image from a book of photos of Washington. I like this image of the road so much that I really didn't want to alter it in any way, so it seemed like a good idea just to shape a tiny poem for it.

Two tiny stanzas of hay(na)ku, collaged onto a trading-card-sized piece of recycled paperboard. The text is from a 1941 issue of The Family Circle, and the images are from a book of pictures of Washington state and a magazine that I painted over.

I made a 12-page collaged booklet using (among other things) images and text from a book of pin-ups. The poem below is a reconfiguring of the text which makes up the booklet: each page in the booklet has a few lines on it, and here I've condensed and changed a bit. Recycled Beauties Not movie stars, much more than sleek limbs followed by countless others, these girls who are now elderly women, girls of a specific time, a specific war, still promise a wonderful postwar world. Things are peaceful where they wear sheer dressing gowns or nothing at all.