PAPER JAM IDEAS & INSPIRATION

 

Paper is a free-spirited and forgiving medium. There’s no “right way” to work with your pack. Here’s a gallery of projects to get your creative juices flowing, and if you scroll down, you will find suggestions and support for various personality types. Thanks for being here, reusing stuff, and making things!

 

TELL ME WHAT TO DO

Happy to. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head.

  1. Make the world more beautiful. Take an object that’s visually boring–a postcard, a card, a picture frame, a journal entry, an index card, a notebook cover, a box for keepsakes, or Kleenex–and cover it with a paper collage to make it interesting.

  2. Make a vision board. Go with your gut here and don’t worry if it doesn’t make tons of sense right away. (Doesn’t have to be big!)

  3. Make an original piece of art. Collage can be abstract or representational. Abstract is about tapping into some kinda vibe and rolling with it. Representational is about recreating a person, place, or thing.

  4. Make something that solves a problem. Do you have a piece of art or a photo that doesn’t quite fit into any picture frame you can find? Could you fashion some of your paper into a makeshift matboard to fill the space in the frame so you get the art or photo out of storage and on display?

DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO

As you wish.

As Cousin would say, “Let it rip.”

I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO, BUT I WANT TO MAKE STUFF

I feel you. Let’s lower the stakes, and your blood pressure, fifteen minutes at a time. Grab a glue stick, scissors, and a “canvas” (a scrap of paper, a sturdy piece of junk mail, or a flap from the cardboard box you recycled this morning). Unleash the contents of your packet and begin cutting and pasting. There’s no goal, no destination, no purpose. Let that tightly wound mass of tissue in your skull loosen and begin to unfurl.

Perhaps you spend the entire time sorting your materials into piles, extracting a small part of an image, or rearranging cut pieces on your canvas. Doesn’t matter, there’s nothing to manage here.

Need to know if it’s working? Write down how you feel or a mood descriptor before you start and at the end of your no-need-to-produce-anything-specific time.