Zero Tolerance???

 

Only two pictures of this page because I completely forgot to take photos as I went along .... I blame menopausal brain death!

However you can probably see below how it started out - as a painted background onto which I stencilled with a lighter blue.  The bird on the line are done with washi tape, and I couldn't resist this stone angel!  That was as far as I got for a while .... I do sometimes work that way, just make the "beginnings" of a page and then let it lie awhile until I'm ready to work on it.  Sometimes I never get to that point, and then I might gesso over it or cover it with paper.

However, on this occasion I found the words zero tolerance in a newsletter and knew immediately what I wanted to write about ... the question I keep asking myself, why I am becoming so much less tolerant of bad spelling and rudeness and any number of other things as I get older?  I don't know - does it have something to do with having less time ahead of you than behind?  Other people I ask about it say they are the same, but I never WANTED to be a grumpy old bat making speeches to people that begin with "young man .....".  Lord, maybe I'm becoming my mother????

So then of course it was dead easy to come up with a whole list of stuff that makes me cross ... and I could have written more!  Except of course that I didn't want to admit (even to myself) just how very VERY cranky I can be...

And finally of course I had to add my usual doodling just in case the page looked a bit empty - but now I look I seem to have drawn fireworks??  All this tells you that I hav, alas, become the proverbial grumpy person you would do well not to cross - perhaps the angel's tears are for the nice person I used to be??? Help.

TRYING TO BECOME .....

 

I seem to be having a dry spell art-wise at the moment ... which is fine, it goes like that at times.  The one page I have done since our holiday is this one ....

A Neocolour (Caran d'Ache crayons) background - what else - and then the panels which look a bit like vertebrae have been added with Promarkers.  Provided the crayon isn't put on too thickly the markers work really well on top.

This thought came out of one of our bible readings at church (totally forgotten which one!) which set off a train of thought about life as a process of becoming rather than a pursuit of personal fulfilment or happiness.  In other words, the idea that I am a Work in Progress, as yet unfinished, but nonetheless someone who has learned and grown much so far .....

Once I'd developed the lettering the "vertebrae" patterns I'd doodled on tended to fade into the background a bit, so I outlined them to help them "pop" off the page.  I think the backbone pattern I can see here (even if you can't!) may have subliminal meaning, as in the basic bones or structure of my days.  OK and maybe not!  After that I just sort of doodled to my heart's content.

And the result is not a bad reflection of where I am right now - sort of drifting/doodling about, settling to nothing much, yet with a sense of good things ahead .... which is an OK sort of place to be.  August is like that anyway; all committee meetings and other "stuff" stops for the summer, so its a good time to just rest and float about a bit. After all, its not necessary to always be achieving something or growing as a person .... sometimes its just about being and listening.