How to Make an Origami Collage

Planning the New Year

On my sister site, Connecting Random Dots, take a look at Who's Looking Over Shoulders, about the connections between artists and their origami collages when envisioning the kind of new year they want to move toward.

I wish you could be there with us, and so I’m going to give you the “recipe,” step by step guidance how it’s done, so you can do it at home, or with a group of friends and family members.

This is an activity to help you focus and bring more of what you love to do into your life in 2025. To get rid of the clutter. To make time, space and energy for the things you know are meaningful and good for you.

Start by jotting on the back of the sketchpaper a word of two for the best possible year ahead. I chose “Hope and Trust” for this origami collage. You can use these words or any other that gives you a very good feeling.

You’re going to choose a color for every activity you want to bring in. You’re going to write down the activity and choose a color for every activity. Choose between 6-12. These could be related to the arts, your health, relationships, finances, because at the end of the day all affects our creativity.

The origami paper collage can help give you a snapshot for 2025 and how the areas of your life that matter most can give you a more expansive, brighter outlook. Revising an ingrained perspective can be very tough when you work at changing your thinking. But feelings melt into something new and softer when art, and particularly color-coded origami paper, becomes the medium of change.

It’s very simple: start by choosing origami colors, one for area that you wish to explore in your collage. Choose different hues. Cut a corner of each paper and label them. From hereon, your pink origami paper isn’t just a pink piece of paper. If you’ve written, for example “Make a painting weekly,” and the time you’ve got to make art is limited by other responsibilities, this pink piece of origami paper is going to take on a life of its own. How you choose to cut and paste it is going to show you quite a bit about how you see yourself as an artist in the context of a busy week with a lot else going on.

The positioning, the size, the overlapping, detail, the patterning, the intricacy of each origami paper is more than a symbolic expression of how you plan for the new year. Through it, you can grasp how your subconscious mind is planning according to emotions, lifestyle, priorities, and other queues you’re feeding it daily. Changing life habits it hard. Changing the way you cut and paste a piece of colored origami paper is alot simpler. But surprisingly, it’s powerful and affective in helping you redesign life’s priorities.

After making the collage you turn over a Genesis Art Card, either using the classic Genesis Way deck or the Genesis Art Card App, and start observing connections between what you’ve created in your origami collage, with the colors, forms, objects, themes and label, and connect them to your randomly chosen Genesis Art Card.

Can the colors of each category be found on your selected card?

Is one color prominent?

Is a prominent on your collage also in the selected card?

The beauty of working with paper you cut or tear to any shape you like is that the pieces can be easily added or subtracted. Just peel off a colored paper and reshape it or delete it.

Notice on your randomly chosen Genesis Art card an element that calls your attention. For instance: are colors overlapping? Are origami papers placed far apart? (showing activities compatible with each other, or distant from one another?)

Do origami papers interlock like puzzle pieces. What about the size of the origami paper? What is most prominent?

Refining Your Ability to See Connections Becomes Simple.

Curious to try with me?

Special offer to all free Subscribers!

I’ll be offering you a one-hour walk-through of this Origami Collage session live on Substack on Sunday February 2nd at noon Eastern Standard Time/7 pm Israel Time.

It’s free, and you can just hop on. But if you become a free Subscriber by February 3rd, you’ll receive the promotion code to download the Genesis Art Card App for free! A $9.95 value.

I created the Genesis Art Card App with all sorts of goodies, a virtual deck of the 44 Genesis Cards viewed face up and face down for shuffling, a video to show you how to use the Genesis Cards, links to becoming an active member on our Genesis Art Whatsapp group, where you can share art made with the Genesis Art and receive uplifting comments.

There’s also a game featured in the App, called “The Observation Deck.” Playing it will help you refine the way you see connections, and your ability to notice increasingly smaller and subtler connections between two works of art. It’s available for $9.95 on the iOS and Google Play stores but free to all who join the February 2nd Origami Collage session. I warmly invite you to find out more about Genesis Art at: http://www.genesiscards.com