My Most Inspiring Vision Board Yet

I’m more than half-way to my Century ride and while I’ve written down some goals (reserving any finishing time related goals until I have a clue how fast I might hope to be), it’s taken me awhile to put together a vision board for myself. I finally finished it earlier tonight.

A long-time reader of Karen Walrond’s blog at Chookooloonks, I loosely followed her process described here (images may be missing, but the text is helpful), here, and here, as well as that of Christine Kane (on Karen’s recommendation).

First, I settled in with a pile of magazines and a favorite beverage.

Because I knew that I was making my “Athlete” vision board, I selected mostly fitness and healthy eating magazines. Scissors in hand, I started by cutting out any images or words that grabbed my attention. I sort images and words into two piles right away and then set aside the words for later. I flipped through the images a few times, putting the rejects in a folder for next time and keeping the ones that kept tugging at me.

In the past, I’ve cut cardboard boxes open to create a surface for my collaged images, but I wanted something sturdier for this one so I picked up a 12″x12″ Artist Panel at my favorite local art supply store, Wet Paint. Next, I laid the board on a table and started loosely placing my favorite images on it, further editing based on space and trying to cover the whole surface without losing any significant (to me) parts of the images I wanted.

Next, I went through the words I had cut out and placed them on top of the images, deciding which were most important to keep and if any were missing. I remembered that “athlete” was absent from any of the magazines I had so wrote that by hand. It seemed a rather critical word to include in a board that’s all about my life as an athlete.

I started to get an idea of what should go where, what to overlap and what parts to run off the edge of the board. I decided to try gently turning the rough draft upside down so I could glue things in reverse order, getting them in the place I wanted them. This sort of worked, but in the final version several images shifted, some better, some obscuring something I’d hoped to peak through. I used Golden Gel Medium Soft Gel (Gloss) to collage everything down. In my experience, the paper buckles with this technique, no matter the substrate. To be honest, I don’t mind much. Perhaps I’m at last releasing some of my perfectionism. Or maybe I like the added texture, separating the piece I make from the magazines the images come from.

Here’s the end result (let me know if you want to see an annotated version explaining what’s on here):

Now, to pick a place to hang it. I was going to hang it on the basement wall in front of my bike trainer, but since I’m doing almost all my training outside now, that’s not a great place. I want it somewhere I’ll see it every day. I may put one even coat of gel medium or Mod Podge over the whole surface and then hang it in my bathroom.

Here are a couple of other resources to help you make your own vision board:

Marita Steffe’s Vision and Words

Soul Collage (about making a deck of cards rather than a single board, but the ideas around selecting images might be helpful)

The first night at CampWILD, we will make vision boards. Here are a couple of examples from previous camps:

Mara Schwartz's WILD vision board, posted on her refrigerator door

Mari Ruddy's WILD Ironman Vision Board