An 8-panel collage done as a single A3 sheet

I used to be a Collage Flow Doubter

As a bit of a perfectionist and realist, I have always been a bit of a doubter when it comes to collage and junk journaling. I used to want my art to be a precise science, and every line and blob of colour have a place on the page. No room for error. But when it comes to the creative process, there are no rights and wrongs, it just … what’s right for you. The main hurdle is that analytical and critical voice in your head questioning your creative actions.

As soon as I started to experience that feeling of being in the flow, I suddenly realised the joy of collage and altering books to create art junk journals. And now that I’ve started, it’s bloody difficult to stop!

Getting In The Flow

I think, in the past, what has put me off the concept of being in the flow is the Instagram reels and YouTube videos where collage artists light a candle before they start creating and have a few moments of silent meditation to get them in the zone. If this works for you, fair play – but it’s not an essential element of me getting in the flow. So how do I get in the flow?

I enter a flow state differently – without the candle and meditation. I just start creating and live in the moment, and the flow creeps up on me. There’s something very soothing and relaxing about choosing, tearing, and gluing little bits of paper onto a surface. Collage is a feast for your senses. It lets you experience your creation through sight, sound, and touch all at once.

• Visual: You get the visual satisfaction of being drawn to a specific colour, shape, or image, and then that positive visual feeling as you place one piece next to another on your collage.
• Auditory: You get the auditory buzz from the intentional rip (or snip) of the paper, and listening to it crinkle between your fingertips.
• Tactile: There’s also a tactile response as you run your fingers over rough and smooth surfaces during the selection process, and that feeling of connection as you glue down pieces onto your collage, and you begin to accumulate layer after layer of glue onto your fingertips.

All of a sudden I become aware that my decision-making has become intuitive. There’s no negative voice in my head questioning my motives, there’s just a positive feeling that the creative action I’m taking is the right one.

How Negativity and Critical Thoughts stops The Flow

When you’re not in the flow during your collage activities, you over-think and judge your decision-making process:

• “I need to find the ‘perfect’ piece of paper before I can even start gluing.”
• “If I glue this down now, I might ruin the whole page.”
• “This looks like a kids art project.”
• “I’m not as good as other collage artists.”
• “I don’t know what I’m doing – I’m wasting my time.”
• “I’m wasting expensive paper and glue on something this ugly piece of crap.”

Rather than enjoying the creative process, you obsess about the outcome and worry about all the hurdles you have to jump to complete your collage, and your negativity and judgement make you miss the enjoyment of being in the moment.

How it Feels to be In The Flow

When you take the collage process incrementally, and only focus one particular steps at a time, it’s easier to exist and react intuitively. Your collage activities become a moment by moment cycle of intuitive decision/action, intuitive decision/action, intuitive decision/action.

I love the feeling of moving a piece of paper around the page deciding where to place it within my collage page, and all of a sudden there’s a pulse of positivity: “ooh yes that’s nice/good” or “OMG I love it”.

Now the danger is that you only settle for those OMG moments, because then you get stuck in a analysis paralysis cycle, and that little negative voice in your head will be shouting “don’t settle for putting it there, there’s a better place, keep looking for perfection.”

It’s that search for perfection that is crippling. So for me, as soon as I get a positive feeling no matter how strong – I go with my choice of placement, and then move onto my next piece. Worse case scenario is that I end up covering it up later in the process because I actually feel a better solution for that area of the collage. The trick is not do dawdle, but to be decisive and move on.

In the Flow and your Subconscious

That pulse of positivity is driven by your subconscious. It’s a gut reaction of placing two pieces next to each other. There’s no conscious critical analysis of the shapes, colours, tones, or subject matter of an image, it’s just an intuitive response to a pattern you’ve created.

In a split second your subconscious has scanned millions of visual images stored in your brain, and guided your hand with that nudge of positively.

Humans are pattern-driven beings, and as long as you don’t fight it, your brain doesn’t need the help of your conscious knowledge to understand the rules of balance, colour harmony and composition. The trouble is when you try to overrule that vast store of intuitive knowledge bubbling deep within you, with learned rules and logical thinking.

What it’s important to realise is that when you’re in the flow or in the zone, it’s not just a series of random guesses. Instead, it’s your subconscious working on overdrive to guide your decision making process with an emotional response rather than a logical one.

May the Flow be with you!