WHERE?

Having lived in vicarages for the last 35 years (mainly old, cold and beyond our means to heat) we've never actually owned a house, and now that we're in our sixties its becoming a concern.  As you know I always work out my worries in my art journal, and that's why I made this page.  There's something about putting things down on paper and naming them that helps to sort them out!

I didn't actually know it was going to be a cri de coeur at the time, but I wanted to make a page in monochrome shades so I began as you see below with a simple coat of grey paint and a spot of gesso on some bubble wrap.  I like to use expensive art materials!

Then I made a border around the page using scraps of this and that, mainly culled from magazines. Again, very expensive collage stuff!  These are the sorts of techniques I go with when I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing with a page - just paint a background and put a border around it.  Sometimes it will stay like that for a while ... but I almost always come back to it eventually.

As you can see, at this stage it sort of needed something - so I chose to add some touches of red, and that really livened it up!  I had liked the orangey feather when I stuck it down, but it definitely looks better coloured red with a Promarker - I often use these to change the colours of collage elements.  If I want to blot something out (like a pattern or writing) then my wonderfully opaque posca paint pens are the best for this.

It was coming across the word "where" in my collage cuttings box that produced the cry from the heart "where are we going to live".  Now of course know that I should have faith and trust in God's provision, but sometimes (like most people) I have a bit of a wobble.  That's what happened here.

And then it was a matter of finishing off with the final details.  You might notice that I actually outlined the edge of the border to give it more definition, and I used small black dots as shading. This is actually quite a simple page, technically speaking, but its not always necessary to use ambitious techniques - the main thing for me is getting the thoughts and feelings down on paper.

I am now back to trusting Herself Upstairs for the future, but I have been mentioning lately that something with no stairs would be a great blessing ......