I was initially intrigued by the theme for this year’s annual collaborative book. It sounded so mysterious and gothic. The vision that persisted in my mind was the hit television series ‘Charmed’; the 3 wickedly sexy witches, spells, book of shadows and suddenly I’m definitely enticed and thinking this could work out rather well. There must be a hundred ideas I could come up with.
My final 'work of art' above. I can smile about it now, but at the time I thought I'd never get this project started or finished. Not from lack of trying, just unable to come up with one riveting idea. But it did eventually start taking form in my mind, and once I got started, I thoroughly enjoyed putting it together and watch it evolve into something completely different to what I initially envisioned.
Six weeks before the project was due, slight panic had set in as I still hadn’t gotten my shit together and come up with a theme or a draft for this project. No image, no colour scheme, no spell ... For all the hours I'd spent thinking about it, researching the net and prowling the library aisles for anything on witchcraft, spells. Nothing jumped out at me. 15 pages to complete – not drastic, but time consuming when you have to consider layers of paint, adhering images, layers of gloss spray, kindy glitz, texture paste and drying time in between each. And considering the only time I could steal was at night during the week.
Over several weeks I’d been perusing the internet for an appropriate image. Again I had no idea what that image should represent, but I knew I would know the minute I laid eyes on it, and how right was I. I came across it by chance whilst doing my regular obsessive trip to online stores for those items I most definitely didn’t need, but had to have … with the intent of using it one day.
And there she was, portrayed against a mystical background of sparkling colour and suspended in mid air. Upon first sight I knew I’d found here. Woooo Hooo ‘Writers block’ over. Well not quite, but it was a start, now I just had to incorporate her into a complete page. But she was perfect and coincidentally actually looked like one of the Charmed Ones.
Days later, I had my image and nothing else, writers block returns. My problem was the colour. Although she was perfect, I’m just not a red kinda gal. I detest this colour, but refused to photoshop her into another as the red was so becoming and suited the ‘Book of Shadows’ theme. It represented in my mind dark and mysterious, death, wickedness. Somehow I'd make this work.
And so I plodded along and eventually got it right. My WIP doesn’t look like much but I’m amazed at all the aspects it took to pull the whole piece together. What started out as a lovely piece of carefully chosen red paper with a beautiful and apt pattern, got completely buried in the final piece. If you squint enough, you can still see a slight resemblance of a background pattern peeking out from layers of paint.
Next were a few pieces of white square cardstock adhered to the corner to create some underlying texture (again barely visible in the end). Then various stages of several layers of paint that seemed to have taken over the page.
To start giving it character I added my lady in red, a Stamp Anon ‘tree’ stamp, an rchitecture stamp on tissue paper, more paint, then a big smear of texture paste on the bottom portion of the page, this I was hoping would create an illusion of my ‘witch’ floating. Didn’t quite work out that way, but still a nice touch I think. My pentagram in 'the background' was drawn with a circle template and the lines penciled in free hand, outlined with black kind glitz to give it a raised effect and again painted over with various shades of red to blend in with the overall page.
I’m not overly disappointed with my page, but always interesting to see what you initially conjure up in your mind, never really turns out to be anything remotely similar.
