I was so inspired by mixed-media collage artist Corey Moortgat's beautiful artwork in The Art of Personal Imagery that I decided to create a project that would resemble her unique style. On page 61 of the book there is a project that Corey created that is a collage of various ephemera pieces, photos and her hand drawn birdcage. My recreation of this project was done using the 7gypsies naked portfolio. The portfolio is a unique ready-to-alter folder that you can use to store photos, artwork, ephemera and more.

I began by painting the inside and cover with white gesso (5HSP24941). Once the gesso had dried I painted the 3 pocket flaps on the inside with blue paint (5HSP24866). I gathered some various patterned papers to decorate the front. For the main background paper I used the blue paper from the Lynne Perrella paper kit (5SC-50100V2), for the vertical strip on the left edge I used the harlequin paper from the Paper Designs pastel paper pad (5HV-HVP-03) and for the paper on the bottom right corner I used artist paper from the Somerset Artist Paper pack (5LEG-ARTIST1). I also cut out a rectangular piece of vintage paper for the center. Next I glued all the pieces down with Collage Pauge (5DU-MATTE16) and allowed them to dry. To create the washed look I mixed up some gesso (5HSP24941) with a little water and then painted over all the patterned papers and set aside to dry. Once the front was completely dry I stamped the bird image “Mobile Home” from the Colette Copeland collection (C8493) onto the center with brown ink (5TS-BROWN). I then drew around the edge of the bird image with a blue gel pen (5SK-GLAZE). Using a black pen I hand drew the bird cage – to reproduce the same style of bird cage images that Corey creates. I added some clip art text images (5AR-M160) to the top right corner.