Leaf Ghost #20

I know that observations such as “I haven’t tried this in years” and “the last time I did this was in college.” But seriously, the last time I made a collage was elementary school. Amy does brilliant collage work that I could never hope to match, but I thought it might be fun to at least try making a leaf ghost collage.

During our ongoing efforts to get rid of the clutter in our house, we found a couple of old road atlases. They’re outdated – not to mention generally useless in the age of map apps on our phones – so they weren’t keepers or donate items. Rather than just throw them out, I thought they might make fun sources of collage materials.

My original plan was to make the background out of streets from the city pages and then do the leaf as a combination of forests and water. But when I started leafing through the first atlas, I noticed that it had two different shades of green for parks and woodlands.

It took awhile to section the usable parts of the maps down into 1.5 inch squares and then cut them all out. For the streets I used a map of downtown San Francisco, supplementing it with Denver to get all the pieces I needed. The greens came from various forests in California and Colorado. My old T square, which had been gathering dust in the basement for years, came in handy for this part of the project.

Once I had the maps cut up, I waited for darkness so I could use my light box to trace the lines from the sketch onto the collage squares. As they had printing on both sides and the sketch itself was faint, this part took some doing.

The next day I trimmed all the leaf pieces down and then pasted everything to the page. I used acrylic medium, my first time working with the stuff. Amy uses it all the time, so she gave me some great advice about how to make it work.

Some light green gouache to fill in the cracks where the pieces didn’t precisely line up. Some black gouache for the drop shadow (I’ll probably use grey watercolor next time so the shadow isn’t quite so opaque). Erase the pencil lines, and done.

This one kinda takes on a political overtone. The dead (yet green) leaf made of wilderness in the middle of a chessboard of urban grids ...  it reminds me of the “I’d rather be a forest than a street” line from Paul Simon’s version of El Condor Pasa.