Believe in Yourself

This week's prompt on Colour Me Positive is: expanding yourself, and the art challenge was to put some wings on your page. 

I started with the background which was done with acrylic paints and the Line Waves stencil from Stencilgirl Products. On that background I glued pieces from 2 different paper napkins; one of flowers and the other of gold ornamental scroll patterns.  I took my inspiration from the colours of the background  to go and look for imagery.

I found a golden angel (with wings!) that came from a painting by Simone Martini (dated 1333) of the Annunciation. Originally I was going to add Mary too but I decided that would take the expanding theme a step too far (or maybe several steps!). She also looked rather miserable and that didn't fit the golden theme the pages were taking on.

Instead I found a themed box of rubber stamps by Anna Griffon, called Bees & Dragonflies and stamped on the dragonflies in golden and the bees and diamond shapes in black. I then discovered another dragonfly image in my collection and glued that on too.

The words of the poem If by Rudyard Kipling to me encapsulated the "expanding yourself" theme and I knew I had cut it from a newspaper some time ago. The words I liked best were added to the page.

The final rubber stamping and the one that provided the title of this spread (done in my A4 Dylusions journal) came from a rubber stamp from Donna Downey and it says:

"Trust in

your potential,

enjoy the process,

try

something new,

explore

possibilities, 

but most of all 

believe"

I added to that at the bottom: in yourself..

I did some outlining with black and white markers and added a further quotation written in: "If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you.