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At the beginning of this month as we contemplated the concept of creativity, I challenged you to create a vision board for yourself: a board which would visually capture the things that you hope for yourself for the year to come. This past weekend, as is our tradition, my 6-year-old daughter and I created our own vision boards (an aside: this is a great project to do with your kids, particularly when they're on vacation from school and you have no idea what to do with them while they're home. Alex loves doing vision boards, and I love doing them with her -- and it takes some time to do, so we always feel like we've spent some quality time together as a result).
In any event, I thought I'd pop in before the end of the month by sharing our process with you (such as it is), in case you haven't created your own board yet, and were looking for how to get started.
A couple of disclaimers before I begin, however:
1. My daughter and I sort of go a little insane with our vision boards. Please do not let this deter you. There is no right or wrong way to do this. At its core, a vision board simply requires you to have a stack of magazines for you to page through and cut out the images that move you, a flat surface to adhere them to, and some adhesive. You can even just use a cork bulletin board, magazine photos and thumbtacks -- no glue required. Feel free to do this simply. Seriously.
2. I'm feeling a bit vulnerable sharing this with you, for I do not consider myself an "artist" in the traditional canvas-paints sense of the world. This is, actually, also okay -- because the vision board is not something that you ever need to share with a single soul. Vision boards are completely personal: Normally, I wouldn't be sharing this, but I feel that just the exercise of making a vision board, the process of making your dreams visible and concrete, is so transformative that I'm totally and fully willing to risk ridicule by sharing my work. But remember, you're not going to have to show anyone, if you don't want to. This fully selfish exercise is all about you.
Okay.
So, as I mentioned before, all you need is a stack of old magazines, a flat surface, some adhesive, and some time to daydream. As it turns out, I'm a pretty voracious recycler, so we hardly had any old magazines in our house to do this. So Alex and I went out and purchased three magazines each -- magazines which tend to be favorites anyway. When we came home, we took about an hour or so to go through each page of our magazines, cutting out images, phrases and even articles that spoke to us. We also looked around for letters and cards that we'd received during the past year that had speceial words or phrases and added those in the mix.
Once we had our images, words and articles, it was time to glue them. Again, any flat surface would do, along with rubber cement or glue; however, Alex and I like to hang ours on the wall all year long, so we actually use 16"x16" stretched canvases, and we adhere or cut-outs with gel medium (which is sort of like the paste you used to use when you were in kindergarten) -- smearing some on the canvas with our bare hands, placing our cut-out on top, and then smearing some more gel medium on top of that.
I like to make sure that my canvas is completely covered by the images and words (sometimes overlapping them on top of each other):
But Alex doesn't care if there's some white space between words and images (also, she tends to be highly liberal with her gel medium):
Either way works (and the gel medium dries to invisible, anyway). Remember, this is all about you. Whatever works for you is
