Every year I ask for a small calendar for my Christmas stocking and every year some nice Family Santa Person (Griffin) gives me one and then it's put to very good use for the next twelve months. I always choose the 8" square size as I'm not a big fan of the serious, stuffy business-y books and the wall size ones are really too big for me to carry around even though I could more than fill up the space in each day's allotted block. Besides, these little ones have themes I'm drawn to: hummingbirds, French Impressionists, Edward Gorey stories etc, and the photos on each page are vividly printed. Being a super anal list maker extraordinaire, I tend to hang on to my calendars even after the year is over as I'm of the belief that I never know when I might need to go back and retrieve a tidbit of information that was jotted in a calendar from a previous year. That and I like to keep the artwork from some of them.This year's calendar for 2009 is an Edward Gorey calendar complete with a delightfully twisted tale of a little girl who meets a rather grisly end (the typical Gorey story) and while I was recently making note of some appointments and whatnots that needed to be entered on their respective dates, I thought to myself that this size is perfect for quickly executed tiny collages. And, the fact that there's still seven months left to this year means that there's loads of time to fill my current one up with googly art as the year grinds on. Just so long as I keep the collages a month or so back from current time, I can still see what's on- or what was on- the agenda when needed. And I haven't done any collages in ages and ages, which are a nice non-hard work break from the usual workload.
This is the first one I did in my current calendar to kick off this new idea of mine. Fast, fun and an easy way to recycle a book for art purposes, even while it's still being useful in a traditional way.
