To Slice, Glue, and Rearrange

I first read about this form of collage as "Victorian collage," probably in The Surrealist's Handbook or something. Victorian women used to amuse themselves by cutting out pictures from newspapers and magazines and gluing them together in whimsical, imaginative rearrangements. You can imagine how appealing a group like the Surrealists would have found this and soon it was the rage. Even today, when someone wishes to represent the jumbled thoughts of insanity, an artist may find it convenient to fall back on Victorian imagery for a somewhat nightmarish effect.

I have no such imagery. Well, I do, but it's in its original form and I'm not going to savage it just to make tawdry, half-conceived artistic stabs. I do, however, have other magazines with beautiful, stylized photography. For this card I used an old map of Tokyo, recreated by Cavallini Papers & Co., and then cut out pictures of arms from an old issue of Flaunt Magazine. The hand with the compass was from a Hennessey ad, the girl's hand from an ad for Bioshock, and the jack-all-points arm from some tedious photo shoot for a clothing designer. You know how those go. Well, they're not entirely without worth, as you can slit out a limb or maybe an intact garment for superimposition.

I had an X-acto knife on hand and recently purchased extra-strength glue stick. I glued the blank postcards onto the back of the map first and then cut them out, to ensure they would lay flush to the edges. I had no vision for the imagery to start with, just cut out an arm and then found two more. I lucked out with the "tomorrow calls," though, also unplanned.

And many people on Postcrossing object to homemade cards (for reasons unknown to me) but I still think cards like this will come in handy in special occasions. And I can scan them in for my own portfolio, and even upload them to any of the dozens of online postcard-printing operations (I've had success with Zazzle in the past) that have sprung up in recent years.

Update: Made some more cards. Expanding collection will be archived here.