The many steps to Finishing Your Art | Collage week 8

I hope you enjoy today’s batch of seven freshly made collages and some thought on the steps you need to take to actually finish your artwork, or rather, what to do when you think it’s done…

This blog post contains collages number 50 to 56 made this year, as I continue creating in my series “365 collages in 2025”.

Let me just start by saying that I really appreciate your time, thoughts, feedback and comments. I also (very much) appreciate any retweets of this or any of my blog posts on social media. Re-share it, forward the emails, link up, tell your own blog readers or followers about this corner of the world – that you enjoy visiting or find inspiration here. That would be so kind of you. Link love really is my comfort food, but also the lifeblood of the blogging community.

I’d also love it if you would let me know which of these collages you’re most drawn to, if any, and why. What about that collage speaks to you? It’s part of my ongoing evaluation of my art, but also, yes, an invitation for you to comment on all the blog posts feat. collage this year because it will help a lonely artist (me) to not only keep gluing (which I will in any case) but to keep sharing online in a hostile world. Thanks.

If you are subscribed via email you can always click the green button at the end of the email that say “continue reading” to visit the blog post and leave a comment (and see the ending of it of course). If you’re reading this in a feed-reader like Feedly you can read the post in its entirety there, and then either click the “Visit website” at the end of each blog post, or the title of the blog post, to open it up in a browser and leave a comment that way.

Leaving a comment is a free and quick way of saying “I see you, I read you, I appreciate the things you produce and share here”.

Creating handmade no tech involved art is involved, joyful and hard work. Once your artwork is created, there’s always more work left. I wrote about how I deal with the organization of a 365 back when I did my first “365 collages” in 2013, and I think many of those bullet points are still true today. I still scan, edit, title and sign my artwork when the art is done. I have stopped dating it, other than year, but that’s because I have no clue right now what day we’re on…

The big difference is that I am no longer upload to Flickr as I am not paying for a pro account anymore. I am in the humongous process of transferring all the images I have blogged via Flickr to my blog, one by one anyway, so updating there would be silly.

Since I wrote that guide on organization I have learned how to print my own sticker labels for the backside of my artwork, which is very helpful and something I’d recommend everyone doing a big project to look into.

This year I created new labels for my current project of course. My sticker labels have spaces for “title” and “number” that I fill in by hand, __ “in the series of 365 collages in 2025”. These new labels even have a tiny little QR-code that you can scan with your phone to be taken to “more information” about the project here on my blog! I amaze myself with my cleverness, LOL.

I am keeping a running list of titles in a document on my computer to keep track of myself. Right now I’m also experimenting with using the meta information of the scanned high res. file to store “more information” – like the artwork’s number and title. In the metainformation this is kind of hidden but at lest kept with the artwork image. This is also where you can add your own, personal tags (descriptive words) to photos to find them easier later on (which is so handy if you actually do it regularly). Anyway. Adding this information into the field “title” also populates the wordpress media fields “title” and “caption” so that I don’t have to type out the title when I add the collage images to a blog post. I still have to add an alt-text though, and make sure it’s in the media archive as well as in the blog post (although I don’t understand why this is not automated).

This might sound like gibberish to you, I get that, but it’s important to do all these steps so that you don’t loose your sanity within the big project. When I have this process more streamlined I might write a new post documenting all the steps I do in order of appearance, for future reference and to help others.

But in the meantime, here’s my helpful link o’ the day. If you want to streamline your own process or learn more about what to do with your art when it’s finished I suggest visiting Alyson Stanfield’s blog. She’s the author of I’d rather be in the studio which I loved and still own.

I read her blog post 12 Steps to Take After Completing Your Artwork recently and was nodding along as I was reading, thinking to myself that there are is crazy amount of steps to take when you think that you have “finished” a piece of art. How do you go about finishing Your Art / Collage?

When I think of it this way I am always asking myself why I keep doing this, and I still don’t really know because I am not selling any of these artworks at the moment. I’m just… sharing and adding in lots of work for myself. Maybe it will pay of when a big gallery calls and asks to exhibit all of these together on a white wall somewhere in the world? I’d take it, but in the meantime, I’ll keep sharing.

Thank you so much for clicking over, taking a look and leaving me a comment below telling me which of these collages you like best – and why you like it.

About this project: I am making one collage for each day of the year in 2025 and blogging seven at a time each week here. I have created 365 artworks in a year thrice before so I am hopeful that I can do it again. Please feel free to also browse week 8 of 2013 and week 8 of 2018 (inspired by Easter). I’d love to know which of these seven collages you like best – and why you like it. Thanks for helping me finish this by cheering me on. I appreciate you being here.
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365 collages in 2025 | previously week 7 (indoor birding) | this is w. 8 | next up w. 9

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All art created by hand by iHanna. Copyright Hanna Andersson. All rights reserved. AI FUCK OF