Define 'Define'

It's President's Day and I'm working. The beauty of working on a holiday is that traffic's not bad. I have a seven-minute drive to work, and it can be harrowing. But this morning it was quite pleasant.

I don't have a project to show you because I forgot to take a photo. But the project I'm just about finished with is a card swap. I worked on it all weekend and at the end of last evening, when it was just about finished, I looked at it and suddenly felt that it was very scrapbook-y. And I have to admit I was disappointed. Twelve scrapbook pages. I don't think that's what I was going for.

Now, I'm not casting aspersions on scrapbooking, because that's where I started and often where I am. It's a great chronicling exercise and frees us up, and it makes me feel great when I can highlight and embellish the images of my loved-ones and commemorate an important experience.

But what I wanted to do was to give the themes (Colonial America, and The American Revolution) a fresh look and a new perspective. I know everything's been done before, but the key is to do it in a fresh way. By contrast, I feel that I've made utilitarian pages. Attractive in a way, but clearcut. Sometimes I want satire, humor, mystery, or even surrealism. I think I know what happened. I was feeling pressed for time and didn't envision the pages first. I didn't think deeply enough about the subject or my focus to bring in more interesting elements.

So I told a friend, who is not a paper artist and has never scrapbooked, that I'm coming up on deadline and I don't really have time to start over. I told her I was disappointed and wish I hadn't made the pages so scrapbook-y.

She said, 'Define scrapbook-y'.

Well, but... isn't is obvious? Or maybe it isn't. I mean, the elements of design and the sensibilities of collage are included in scrapbooking. But if one looks at two pages, one can usually identify which one is scrapbook-y, and which isn't. Can't they?

So I tried to define it. I told her:

Scrapbook-y means pasting focal images (such as photos of people or places, or large elements such as words or frames or charms) on a decorative, pre-printed background in a pleasing arrangement in keeping with traditional design parameters. Whereas, collage and mixed media art usually involve painting or surfacing the background from scratch, using less static images, more diffuse, discordant or even unsettling images, carving or etching surfaces for texture, imposing media such as glaze, wax, metal or wire or textile and fiber to the work in imaginative ways, and utilizing elements of mystery, abstraction or symbolism. All of which usually result in a work whose impact, meaning or message will vary dependent upon a given viewer's experience with the work.

As I was working out this stuffy definition of two approaches to collage, I found myself wondering... how cool would it be to create an entire scrapbook without allowing it to look 'scrapbook-y'? It's probably been done, but I'd like to try it for myself. I have a few short trips coming up and would love to chronicle them as if I weren't chronicling them. I'll see how it goes.

Update: I got a picture of the cards I was talking about. There's a bit more to do on them. They do look kind of scrapbook-y, but they're kinda cool, too.