I didn’t blog much last week: Too busy with destashing and sorting. I didn’t even get messy till today, and I missed it so much… This is a watercolour background that I didn’t like and had no idea what to do with. So I got out my fluid acrylic green paint, sprinkled some drops and squishes over it and went at it with my favourite MMT (mixed media tool): The Brayer.

Now I had a mucky, pretty green background to create with. I started clearing up my workspace and moving containers around and I started to spot green stuff – ribbons, fibres, a little scrap of fabric, some viney ribbon from Patty; some great drawings from a book of Churches that I bought because the drawings are so cool and the paper feels good (if you know what I mean?).

So I used gel medium to stick my collage elements down this time. I don’t always because it can make writing or colouring on them tricky sometimes, but I wanted to retain the detail in these drawings, so a little gel medium over the top was in order. I had the urge to stitch the textile elements to the page instead of sticking them down, so I got the sewing machine out. Here’s the page in its raw form…

Although I liked it, I wanted to add depth and shading, but I didn’t want to spoil this page or work directly onto it, so I compromised by copying it. Even though this is a colour copy, I was surprised initially by how ‘flat’ it looked. Here’s what a little pencil and pen added to it looks like…

Enhancing the copy!

So this is for Take a Word (Green) and I find it awesome that the curved arch means I can also submit it to Tammy’s NoFrills #16 – Curve. I shall go back and play some more with curves I expect, although this started with thinking about the distance between two points. It made sense at the time – what can I say?! 😉