"Meandering: adjective; the act of following a winding or indirect course. Ramble, roam, zigzag, circuitous. A blog post about a variety of things; a little bit of this and a little bit of that." It's been a while. I have these aspirations about being a regular blogger, putting up posts at least twice a week. The reality is I barely make it happen twice a month! But, I really enjoy blogging so for now I'll post when I can and keep striving for my personal goal of posting more often. I am on day 78 of the 100 Day Project. My creative practice of choice for this project was to make collages from scraps on Rolodex cards. I combined this project with the Index-Card-A-Day (ICAD) project which began on June 1st, since Rolodex cards are included as index cards. The difference between the two projects is the 100 Day Project is totally self-led, while the ICAD project provides daily prompts. Some days I use the prompt and some days I don't. You can see all of my Rolodex art cards on Instagram (link in the sidebar on the right). My Rolodex is filling up nicely. :) Ever since I began this venture into making art with paper I have been drawn to collage. Lately I have been drawn to botanical collage pieces. I have come across a few collage artists whose botanical themed pieces just blow me away. One in particular, Julie Hamilton, paints her own papers to use in her collage art. I'm a sucker for painted paper! From www.juliehamiltoncreative.com A few other collage artists I admire for their botanical collage work are: Tiffany Calder Kingston and Jacgui Grace. Click their names and you will visit their websites. So a few weeks ago, inspired by these artists, I painted some papers. I love to use the bookend papers from the books I take a part. This paper in older books has a great weight to it and I love how the color ages over time. With the painted papers I tried my hand at some botanical collage. I even found myself wanting to bring home ferns and leaves from my walks in order to trace them for collage! But I didn't go that far. I used some of my stencils and used drawings from plant books to make templates. Then I used some of the painted papers to make a color wheel for my first page for the Get Messy Season of Color. It's fun to try new techniques with art and I love combining them with my love of nature!