Jen McCleary’s work is anything but ordinary. Her mixed media and digital collage work provokes strong emotion, and she is sure to have a piece that fit in decor of any color. If those pieces are not enough, she also creates pendants with original images, vintage optician lenses, and watch parts.

What types of items do you sell?

Prints of digital collages, original mixed media collages and paintings, and jewelry made from vintage optician test lenses and watch parts. I hope to add some handmade books and decoupaged home decor items (vases, trays, etc.) to the mix in the future.

How did you get into your craft?

I’ve been into art for as long as I can remember. I decided to really focus on painting in high school, and went to art school for painting and printmaking. I got into collage and mixed media at the end of my time there, which was frustrating because there weren’t really classes for mixing things up like that. My painting teachers were annoyed when I’d add pieces of prints to my paintings, and my printmaking teachers were annoyed when I’d paint on my prints. I spent a semester studying in Rome, where I had a class called “Rome Sketchbook” which involved going around to different sites and drawing. But the teacher also really encouraged mixing media, adding ephemera and scraps of paper, making rubbings, basically whatever you wanted. That class was really inspiring and had a lot of influence on my work.

Around that time I discovered that the computer was an incredible tool for playing around with layered imagery and I started my first explorations into digital work. I didn’t really start focusing on digital collage until around 2005 when I got a good digital camera and started wandering around the city collecting interesting images- trees, shadows, rusty drains, decaying buildings, whatever. I bounce back and forth between digital and traditional media- I love the flexibility of digital, but I also love the hands-on process of making paintings and collages by hand. I scan many of my paintings and collages and use pieces of them in my digital collages, and I also will use pieces of the digital work in the traditional mixed media pieces.

I’ve been making jewelry for myself for years, just putting together beads and odds and ends. Only in the past year or so have I been making jewelry for sale. The vintage optician lens pendants are created using prints of digital collages. My original intent was to make traditional collages on them, but the layers of paper were much too bulky. The watch part necklaces are my most recent additions. I love broken mechanical things and so I bought a whole box of old watch parts from Ebay, and have been having lots of fun figuring out ways to make them into jewelry.

Where does your inspiration come from?

I’d say the beauty of nature is a big inspiration, but also things that don’t seem beautiful at first glance- urban decay, cracks in the sidewalk, puddles with interesting reflections in them, rusty things…I like playing around with color a lot (that’s one thing working digitally is great for!), and texture too. I work pretty intuitively, so a lot of times I’ll start out with one idea in mind and then will end up going in a different direction entirely if that’s what feels right.

How do you promote your shop?

I’ve had my Etsy shop since October 2006, but have only recently been making an active effort to promote it. There are so many people on Etsy now that it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. I’ve been trying to do as much online promotion as possible, although it can be time consuming to keep up with everything. I have my own website , a portfolio on Trunkt, a fairly new blog, a Flickr page …I’m a member of the Philly Etsy team and the Vegan Etsy team too. I’m on StumbleUpon and Facebook too, although I haven’t done too much with those yet. I think that’s it! I try to post on the Etsy forums once in a while, because it seems to be a good way for people to find your shop, plus it’s fun taking part in a large community of people making great things!

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