SHE JUST KNEW .....

 

You can imagine that in recent months I've been doing some rather desperate praying, what with a house move and Himself's cancer diagnosis to deal with.  The day I made this I had one of those moments of absolute calm, when I "knew" it was all going to be OK.  Its not easy to hold onto that, but whenever I start panicking its as if a voice in my head says (wearily) "will you not just TRUST me"?  So I try to, with varying degrees of success.

I wanted, no needed, to use bright hopeful colours, and I took these two pictures to show you the magical difference using water on Neocolour II crayons makes!  On the left is the sort of scribbly wax crayon look, which is how it goes down - then on the right is the intense colour you can achieve with a moderately wet paintbrush.  You could also use a waterbrush I guess? The result is awesome!

So onto that background I began to put down some collage.  I organise my collage pieces in a trolley with slim 12 x 12" drawers, and have drawers for colours and then others for neutrals, words and people.  I may think of other categories as I go along.  Now I'm a bit of a tone on tone sort of gal - I like using shades of the same colour, and sometimes you have to remind me that I can use different colours or more than one!

So I pulled out my red/orange drawer - that's the other great thing about the trolley I use, you can just take out the whole drawer and bring it across to the workspace.  I like to cut curved shapes out and layer them up.  Its easy to do and if you're looking for collage techniques you might like to try it?

Anyway, part of this moment of God-given calm was the sense of the interconnectedness of all things, so I began to draw a black line to join them up.  The great thing about drawing wobbly lines on purpose is that it doesn't matter if you er .... wobble!  I also began to add the writing which as you know is so much a part of every page I do.

And once I'd written my words I just set to joyfully doodling to my heart's content - a lovely meditative process.  You'll see that I've drawn and "improved" on the collage pieces themselves - I like to change them so that they're "mine" if you see what I mean.

So there you have it - a happy page for a change, though I can't guarantee to sustain this mood as I am a born worrier however much I try not to be.  But we're safely moved into our lovely new flat (all wheelchair accessible) and beginning to find homes for all our stuff, though the studio still needs work.  Himself is two thirds of the way through chemotherapy (tolerating it amazingly well, must be all that prayer thats going up on his behalf) and should be finished by Christmas.  Then we have daughters and our darling one year old grandson coming - just for a couple of days, which is possibly all we have the energy for, but it will be LOVELY.  Surgery lies ahead but I'm not thinking about that for now, just planning to enjoy the Christmas season :)