#indpost

Hi hi! I’m back with my wizard 101 school collages!

I wanted to do Ice to get in the winter spirit. At first this collage was NOT coming together but after a break (that may or may not have been a couple weeks long) I felt refreshed and I wound up making this!! I’m really happy with how it turned out; I thought my prev one (Death) was a little cluttered, so I avoided that this time around and I’m very pleased by its cohesiveness. Shout out to my dad for the pretty handwriting for the school motto <3

Though I’m far to impatient to be an Ice wizard myself (#storm 4ever- I am a death secondary tho) I really admire the school for both it’s tactics and traits! Shout out to any ice wizards, y’all seem delightful.

As always I printed out images from rawpixel and cut them out for this. I did snag a few from pintrest also, but only after making sure they weren’t AI (my preferred strat is to reverse image search and make sure they existed 4+ years ago)

All in all I’m super happy with how this turned out! There is a part of me that wishes I had used the description of storm that you can find on the Wizard 101 website somewhere. I love that lore and it would make this even richer as a whole BUT I doubt I would have had the space 😔😔😔 Maybe I’ll do an extra page featuring that or something idk.

This one took much longer to get done, thanks mostly in part to executive dysfunction 😁(Though my new kittens have been taking a lot of my time and energy too.)

I’m not as happy with it compared to my storm themed collage, but it’s still pretty good!Besides, I’m finding I like it a lot more now that it’s finished and not a task looming over my head. I got to use my new glass pen for this too!! (The writing + some scribbles)

For this one I knew I wanted ravens/crows and time to be motifs alongside the usual skeleton/gravestone vibes. I’m personally just a huge fan of corvids in general and they can be seen as omens of death soooo… naturally I’m gonna use them! As for the time motifs, I think time is always going to be linked to death- our time is limited after all. I wanted to include more cultures and their own death motifs but I quickly realized I was biting off more then I could chew (I still printed out La Catrina, intending to use her, but she didn’t make it in the end 😔😔😔 lo siento miss Catrina)

I actually got into collage digitally first. (They’re a little embarrassing/selfshippy so I probably won’t share them here unless you/others REALLY wanna see them) I’ll add some slides from a slideshow I made that kinda count as digital collage at the end!

I just wanted a way to put together all my associations, feelings, quotes, iconography and even straight up lore about a given character in one place. My best advice is to think soooo hard about your blorbos, go onto Google drawings (or some other software), look up as many transparent pngs as you can find that fit the vibe, and smash them all together until something comes out the other side! Think of it like one of those aesthetic Pinterest boards but even more customizable to your theme. (Tumblr actually has a ton of blogs dedicated to giving transparent elements for this exact thing.) Plus! When it’s digital, you don’t have to commit to any placements- you can always move things around and play with them until they’re right. (When I do physical collages I use glue tape so there is a point where I’ve mostly committed to something being somewhere- I can always rip something off but I prefer not too.)

Also!! One of my hugest pieces of inspiration are those “____ology” books (like Egyptology or Dragonology) I think it’s why I do so many fold out features within my own physical collages. They’re kids books but they’re whimsical, fascinating, and beautiful kids books. I highly recommend like… all of them.

All in all I love collage because it feels so freeing. When I draw or design from scratch it’s so easy to get caught up in perfectionism and things like that, but for collage I can’t start from scratch. It’s my go-to burnout art because of that: I don’t have to think too hard; all I have to do is search for the right things and smash them together until something greater comes out of it. Make them for yourself, make them while yearning (or an equivalent emotion), and just keep futzing until it feels right.

If you post any collages in the future i would love love love to be tagged- I’d love to see what you wind up making :}