Busy, Long Weekend

It's a long weekend here in Melbourne with our Moomba Festival running. We tend to forget that the holiday is actually Labour Day with its origins in the eight hour day movement. Anyway, I for one, have been hard at work this weekend.

Colour Me Positive Week 10 - Beauty

We were encouraged to remember that we are beautiful inside and out with the quote "Every piece of you is a burst of something beautiful",  and to use flowers on our page. I immediately thought of the garden and using one of my many photos as a basis for the page, but in the end used three stencils to make my page.

For the background, I sprayed with distress stain in purple, mustard, olive and a splash of red. This was sprayed with water and encouraged to flow down and across the pages. Even though I had gessoed the pages, it still leaked through, but luckily did not spoil my previous page. I then used a trellis stencil with modelling paste to give the page some texture (see detail below).

I used a combination of graphite pencil and coloured pencil to outline the trellis effect and suggest a climbing frame. The modelling paste dried clear, showing the colour of the stains used.

Next I stenciled the leaves using three shades of green, followed by the rose stencil using red, pink and cream. The words were printed on parchment, cut and pasted onto the page - and this time, I did use the quote supplied.

Colour Me Positive Week 11 - Intuition / Journal 52 Week 11 - Favourite Creature

It amazes me how often these two challenges have similar themes. CMP this week offered a meditation by Chrissy Foreman Cranitch to help us find our animal totem. I didn't think that I was getting anywhere with the meditation when in strolled a stately giraffe, right on cue - so I had to include one in my page.

The quote for CMP is "Trust your Intuition", and/or use an animal on your page. Meanwhile over at Journal 52, Effy Wild was asking us to create a page that honours your favourite animal. So that meant a search of the WWW  to find a suitable image - which I did on National Geographic.

I drew the giraffe freehand, then covered the page in gesso to get rid of the stain that had leaked through from the previous page - luckily I could still see my pencil drawing! A light wash of watercolour was used to define sky and land, before I got to work with my coloured pencils.

Collages - K

I thought I might use keys or knobs for this one, but decided on "Knick-Knacks" as I knew that I had tons of source material in my Daphne magazines. It's a bit of a challenge in itself to find a word to use, that I know I can get images for.

Well, wherever you are (even if you didn't have a long one) I hope you had a productive weekend like I did. Hope you enjoy my offerings. Cheers.