More Surprising Myself

Okay. So. Manymanymany moons ago, I purchased Kelly Rae Roberts book “Taking Flight: Inspiration & Techniques to Give Your Creative Spirit Wings”. I even did a post about my experience with the book and the whole “standing on the shoulder of giants” thing. In that post, I promised that when I finally did finish my collage, I’d share it with you. Well, guess what? Today is that lucky day! Woohoo!!!

As luck would have it, my “domestic assistant” came over today. For whatever reason, the kids were driving me crazy, so I packed them all up in the car, gave them some money, and sent them to the mall for a few hours. It was so peaceful, so quiet… and so necessary for my sanity! As I was enjoying my quiet cup of chai, I realized that I had no desire to work on anything today. Yes, a bunch of things needed to get done (they always do), but today I really needed to just play.

I decided to do something creative. Not just anything, mind you – something I wouldn’t normally allow myself the time to do. And there it was – my collage. It’s been half-finished and collecting dust on my shelves for a very long time. Filled with patterned papers that I adore and gentle reminders for how I want to live, but only half-finished nonetheless.

Alrighty, then. First, I needed to tidy up the kitchen table so I’d have somewhere to work. Then, I had to dig out all of the supplies I might need from my disaster of an office. And after I had procrastinated by cutting some fresh flowers, finding some good music, checking in on Facebook… I forced myself to just START.

You have to understand, starting the painting part of the collage was the hardest part for me. Not only have I not done any serious painting in, well… years… but I have this little negative voice inside myself that says “your painting is SO naive” – and not in the charming kind of way. But I did my best to ignore that little voice, familiarized myself with Kelly Rae’s techniques again, and got to work.

Long story short, after several attempts – twice for using the brayer to apply paint, three times for adding the shading, and I-lost-track-of-how-many-times for the face – and my girlie was finally done.

At least I think she’s done. I am still trying to decide if I want to add wings to her or not, as well as some black tape around the edges of the frame to “finish it” a bit more. But there she is. Done for now. She’s hardly perfect – the zoologist/scientist in me says “she’s not at all symmetrical… her neck is weird… and where exactly are her shoulders?” And I don’t really like that the collaged paper edges show so much. But the artsy-fartsy in me says “Woohoo!!! Look at what you can do! Way to go, girlie!”

And I think for now, that’s the voice I wanna listen to. 😉