Play your Conflict Card

Layering seems to be my motif du jour at the moment and while in the process it's very easy to loose control of just what is added to the background. At one stage it looked such a mess that I gessoed over it and started again with only little bits of the previous background peeping through. But the next layers made it quite confusing again.  All I know for sure is that it involved the use of only one stencil: the small one from the August 2014 Stencilgirl Club.

One of the reasons I was a bit mixed up about what to do is that there was no clear theme for The Documented Life Project 2016 this week. We were still working with the January Going Out on a Limb theme and the prompt was to add a piece of a receipt from the previous week.

That in itself was a bit problematic as I hadn't been anywhere but I eventually rustled up a receipt of sending a recorded letter at the Post Office. I tore it into three strips and added it as columns to the page. They made me think of trees and that led to the addition of the triangles (from the Row of Triangles stencil by Stencilgirl).  I then added the words (Wonder, Inspire etc. from the Now is the Time stencil

At this stage I wasn't very happy with the spread and wondered how I could bring it back from the brink. I started by adding the leaf shape (from a foam stamp) just to get larger shapes on the page to balance all the small details.

Then I went to my box of cuttings with no clear idea in mind of what else to add. The first thing that caught my eye was an eye! As soon as that was collaged on, the page immediately felt a lot improved. I rifled some more and the text How to Play your Conflict Card felt like the right words for that angry eye as well my conflicted feeling about the spead, done in the 8 x 8" Dylusions journal.

Outlining was done with black and white markers as well as with a blue glitter pen and water soluble oil pastels.