This is the story of the collage that became the flyer for
@here___nor___there Dream Loft, happening tonight at
@stark_vintage_ ! A messy, meandering process that took 6 years. A lot of life—and death—got in the way, but it all turned out beautifully in the end.
SLIDE 2: In 2020 I saw a collage by lucina.jpeg for the #februllage prompt “Extinction”. I loved their concept of a star-person walking up a sta(i)rcase into the sky and I wanted to do my own version. Making 3D stairs seemed like a do-able technical challenge to improve my technique.
SLIDE 3: February 2020 I started cutting stairs, and I knew I wanted a portal in the sky instead of a paper tear. I liked the direction but some stuff happened in the rest of 2020 that distracted me.
SLIDE 4: July of 2021 I came back to it. Coming out of the pandemic, I wanted to tell a more interesting and hopeful story than “extinction”. When I saw the image of a child walking into the sunset with a baby lamb, I knew I’d found my protagonist. Replacing the lamb with the same stars in the portal made it a story about returning a creature to it’s home, and I loved the idea of a child with the agency to walk between worlds.
SLIDE 5: As summer 2021 wound down, the piece was 90% there. And I got distracted again by buying a house, moving, and spending a few years doing ceramics.
December 2025 I got back into collage. To ease back in, I decided to finally finish this piece. Around the same time I got connected with
@jeremydlarson via
@freekskill . He said he loved my collages and wanted to collab on a flyer for an event he was doing. I said I think I have just the thing.
SLIDE 6: I sent him the initial scan and he loved it
SLIDE 7: A few weeks later he sends me the final info and I put together a quick mockup. The name of the event was now DREAM LOFT, which was a perfect fit for a character climbing stairs into the sky. I had *so* much fun playing with typography for this one. I wanted it to feel like a SciFi novel from another dimension; retro and futuristic, but elevated not campy.
Big shoutout to
@marvatype for the two fonts that REALLY tied this whole thing together, Brooch and Swarsh Daisy.
