Knowing When to Stop

I am really pleased with today's 4x6! The layered background turned out wonderful but the rest of it is very simple. I stopped after 10 words this time. I probably would have added words to this had I been doing it my normal way but words are not always necessary and this is a reminder to me that less is sometimes more.

Her face looks a little weird here as I seem to be having a bit of a glare problem with the scanner.

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1 PATTERN - One of my new favourite things to do is after I'm finished a collage I will draw spirals and dots all over the background. This time I decided to try it first and the words helped me out here perfectly. First I drew gold spirals all the base.

2 PASTEL - with a red oil pastel I added dots all over the background.

3 SAND - Not wanting to smudge my pastel dots, I just sanded around the perimetre .

4 CHARCOAL - something I really liked about the last one was the border drawn a quarter inch from the edge so I repeated that here with the charcoal.

5 SMUDGE - with a dry finger I smudged the charcoal line, with the above sanding this made a nice distressed edge which is no longer visable but it looked good at the time!

6 CHALK - along side the charcoal border I added a brown chalk border.

7 INK - this time for ink I used a spray bottle of adirondak color wash (a spray dye) and sprayed over the entire card. I thought it would be transparent allowing the previous work to show through. Let it dry. When I came back I was pleased to see that not only was it transparent but the gold pen and the oil pastel dots acted as a resist and were completely visible. I love the background at this point and am feeling a bit pleased with myself for this unexpected result!

8 IMAGE - just what the card needed at this point! I add the image of the girl head.

9 DRAW - Hmmm. I thought about this quite a bit before I started. The rest of the girl's body appeared in my head and using my very limited drawing ability I drew her coat and altered the bottom half of the original image to incorporate it into her new clothing. I'm incredibly pleased with it at this point but I go on to my 10th word.

10 STAMP - Another hmmmm moment. I take a black ink and large spiral foam stamp and gently stamp three partial spirals along the right hand side.

Now, I'm thinking that the only thing needed is some text so I am hoping the next word will be text, magazine or even write. Feeling my chances are pretty good to get one of those words I pick the next and get ... "Paper".

Well, I gave it a try. I must have placed torn strips or bits of paper in a hundred dozen places, left it, came back, looked at it, tried a different arrangement, left it and so on...... It didn't look right and was totally throwing the whole piece off so I decided it was time to stop.

This is definately my favourite so far. See you tomorrow for the next one!

Comments

Anonymous said…
She is very pretty.

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