PILGRIM ....

This page arose out of my regular habit of cruising art journals on Pinterest in search of challenge and inspiration - its funny what will start me off, sometimes just a colour as in the last post, or a corner of something.  This time it was a page made with vertical rather than horizontal lines - which made me recognise that I have tendency to work across the page rather than down.

So this was me drawing vertical lines and starting to paint the resulting spaces.  At this point I was reaching for more shades of blue, but realised that I also have a tendency to play safe and stay with the same colour, so I boldly plumped for the red and promised myself I would use a wide range of shades.

Well then there was no stopping me and I added orange too, not to mention red dots in the corner!

I had no other plan for this page - I like working intuitively and just seeing what happens.  I didn't know what I was going to write but the sections had begun to look like roads or paths to me, which set off the reflections about being a traveller and a pilgrim.

You can possibly see that I hadn't stuck the eye down at this point because I was still deciding whether or not it belonged there ... I do that often.  It works to just try random pieces of collage in different positions.

When I did stick the eye down I used paint around the edges to blend it into the piece, and then did some more doodling - heavily influenced by Australian aboriginal art, which is really lighting my fire at the moment!  The white horizontal dashes came from that source.

It was quite a journey in itself completing this page, which I worked on over several days.  The tree branches were a surprise to me, as were the orange lines on the yellow which made me think of layers in rock.  The wormhole doodling is a favourite technique which I haven't used for a while.

I'm still excited by working downwards rather than across, and its funny how much difference such a simple thing produced.  I really had FUN making this and genuinely like the result.  Look out for more work which travels down the pages .....