I returned from my June trip to Florida with a large envelope of papers from my week at the American Conchologists annual convention, so of course, I needed to make a collage with them.

I had the beautiful green and blue resort guide and the mandatory wrist band, along with the light blue convention brochure with shells and a pair of glasses like R. Tucker Abbott wore, whose 100th birthday we were celebrating. Parking tickets from the beach, as well as the one week fishing license I bought in case I happened to pick up a shell inhabited by a hermit crab. I had a dozen bidding tags from the silent auctions of beautiful shells, papers from the Parade of Snails where I had two entries, and raffle tickets.

 

I used Yes Paste to adhere some of these items onto a sheet of watercolor paper for my first layer. I added green and yellow acrylic paint to blend the edges with the base.

I still had all the papers from the flights to and from Ft. Myers, Florida. I had two boarding passes and a transfer tag going to Florida. Coming back I had a total of seven boarding passes. Having checked our of my room and turned in my rental car, the curb agent printed out the first boarding pass, but couldn’t print one for the second flight because it had been cancelled.

The indoor agent, after spending forty minutes on the phone to get advise on how to get me back to California, printed out three boarding passes and hand wrote on a blank pass – at my request – the arrival time and departure time for each flight. When I got to the gate, I inquired about the pre-boarding option because I’m always holding up the aisle getting my carry on stuff settled. She printed out a new set of boarding passes.

Going through security in Ft. Myers, my carry-on was selected for a random search, so I was handed a form on heavy paper telling me that my bag had been inspected, even though I was standing right there watching her plow through my precious new shells from the auctions.

I checked two bags on the trip home. The small one, containing my dirty laundry, didn’t make the third flight due to the tight schedule which generated a full page “Courtesy Lost/Delayed Incident Receipt” as well as another tag on the bag when it was delivered the next day.

I added a second layer of some parts of these papers and more paint. When I looked at my work the next day, I saw that I had light and medium areas, but almost no dark areas. To solve this problem I went out into the yard and cleaned up some areas that needed attention for several days.

When I got back to my collage, I experimented with turning the work around to see which way I like best. I still didn’t have a good focal point. Mostly a blue card stood out as the main focus!

A few days later while thinking about the trip as a whole, I realized that the most memorable moment was early Wednesday evening as I was waiting with others in the lobby for the Welcome Party to begin. Suddenly, I was greeted by a man I had met in January of 2013 when the shelling trip I was on had lodging at his beach-side guest house in Panama. He and his wife had spotted me in the crowd. They proceeded to tell me all about the year long round-the-world trip they were about to begin. Half an hour later, I was listening to him give a piano concert for all of us.  Such a wonderful memory.

The next day, still not knowing how to fix the collage, I remembered that the Conchologists magazine had written about his performance at the convention and had a photo of him at the piano. Why not make him the focal point? I made a color copy of the photo to add to the collage. I even used the trimmings from the photo as dark elements along with a bit of dark paint.

Yes, I know he is upside down. I like it best that way.