Your Heart and Soul

It's a Bank Holiday here in the UK today and of course that means it's wet and windy although with an occasional glimpse of the sun, Just as well I have loads to do in the studio. This is my contribution for week 18 of Colour Me Positive. Our prompt for this week was: Healing, and the art challenge to use a heart or hearts on your pages. 

This spread was done in my A4 Dylusions art journal and I started with a gessoed background to which I added acrylic paints and then removed some of it again using a babywipe and a stencil featuring different sizes of hearts. I was aiming for soft, dreamlike colours.

I then grabbed a doily and sprayed through it with a pink Dylusions ink spray. After that I had to be a bit more careful as these sprays are water soluble and in fact using any wet medium on top of them will make them move. I added the XOXO stencil (from the April 2016 Stencilgirl Club)  in the background.

I had just this week cut out the woman in the lovely rose dress from one of the Sunday paper supplements and she was just what I wanted for the page.  I gave her a large blue heart.

The heart shape came from a heart I bought for £1 at the Knitting & Stitching Show on Saturday just for this very purpose. It's thin wood and I used it to mark out the heart shape on a vintage book page. I cut it out and collaged it to the page.

I found a quotation that resonated with the theme of Healing. it reads: "One of the most courageous decisions you'll ever make, is to finally let go of what is hurting your heart and soul". by Brigitte Nicole. I printed it out onto vintage paper and glued that on as shown, antiquing it more with a black Stabilo All pencil and gold embossing paste.

The final touch was the postage stamp featuring a horse running free.