Strength Page

I was going to apologize once again for featuring art here and then I realized just how silly that is. I'm an artist and art is what I do, day in day out, for almost 8 hours a day (and yes, sometimes for far longer). So it is hardly surprising that I have a lot of art to show you, specially as this is hardly the time for gardening visits. Hence no more excuses ever for showing you lots of it.

Specially since this year I have given myself the freedom to do a lot of on-line classes. One of these is the year long Life Book 2015 class and this is the result of one of the classes. I say result but must admit that I veered wildly off course with this page (the original class features a boat!). It was by Mati Rose McDonough (you can see her book in the Now Reading column in the sidebar at the moment) and she was teaching us about gold foiling. And I definitely did that!

I took  my lead from the layering theme of The Documented Life Project. Layering, it turns out, is very much my thing and I love doing it. I started off like the class told me with one layer of paint (orange in my case) and added another (pink for me) layer on top. But after that I let go of the class instructions and added lots of other layers, such as glueing on bits of a paper napkin (with roses), stencilling with a variety of circular stencils, stamping (a map of Paris) in the background,  ink dribbling, etc. etc. Maybe one of these days I might do some step by step photography of this process if I can find the courage to have my camera anywhere near such frenetic painting activities.

Once I was happy with the result I added the gold foiling in spiral shapes as you can see, and then outlined the various shapes with markers and pens, and also used water soluble oil pastels.

The final step was to add the word STRENGTH at the left and the Strength quotation (a stamp from Donna Downey). It reads: "Strenght doesn't come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn't do". It seemed to resonate with my word of this year which is: Courage.

I have already done the next class for Life Book so you will be seeing that one soon too, and it's something completely different. Watch this space!