VERY SMALL ....

So I was sitting staring out of my window (view of solitary daffodil and garages) and thinking about nothing in particular, when I painted this page in shades of lilac and purple, with the odd bit of white.

And there on my desk was this little Stampotique stamped figure - it was on a birthday card I'd made for Himself, and before the cards went into the bin I'd recycled what I could from them for collage (the sign of a true addict)!  The little figure became myself and I added a couple of bits of collage from my stash.  I knew why I'd done it - I was feeling very small at the time, and this little figure captured that feeling very well.

She looked so alone in the middle of the page that a border seemed to be called for.  This is the story of my life; if I can get things safely into boxes it will all be OK!  I don't believe I'm a control freak but I am very organised and like to have things in their proper compartments, not least so that I can always find or access them again.

Look at the contrast between the picture above - where the similar tones are blending into each other - and the image below to which I've added strong black outlines and borders.  Using this technique I find I can bring a lot of disparate collage pieces together in a unified whole.  I use my Posca paint pen for this, because nothing else gives such a strong solid black.

I was looking at the small 'me' person and gazing out of the window again, when I remembered that there is a prayer about being very small.  It took me a while to track it down and then I wrote it on here.  You may notice that I also changed a few colours (using Promarkers) while I was about it - this is the great thing about magazine collage pieces, if they aren't quite the right colour you can just change them!

Then all that remained was to finish the page off with doodles and decorations, as you can see below. Mainly Posca pens again to make dots and swirls and whatever else took my fancy.  My favourite part as you probably already know!

While the idea of feeling very small could seem quite threatening, seeing it in this light of a small human in an eternity of love is oddly comforting.  It made it OK to be small, and safe, because all around me was endless, undying, unchanging love.  It brought me peace.