The Art & Soul of Spring

 

After spending most of the past weeks at home with only short walks in the neighborhood because of my stupid knee, I drove to the lake last Wednesday. While I couldn't walk for an extended period, I did a bit of walking and sat on a bench, writing in my journal and just enjoying the view and being out in nature. I had missed that so very much. In March I will have surgery on the knee and I hope that after that I will eventually be able to hike again.

That Wednesday was the only day in the week with some sunshine; all the other days it rained and especially this president's weekend has been quite stormy again. Nevertheless, on Saturday we met up with friends for some wine tasting and this serves as my ticket for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday.

The rest of the rainy days I was working on a new spread in my art journal. I started out with a page where I had already spread some leftover paint and now glued down several torn book pages. It looked rather chaotic and not very inspiring.

I had a half-baked idea in my mind and wanted to add some pink or magenta.

Oh dear! That was a little bit too bold even for me, so I tried to tone it down with some titanium buff.

I was struggling how to get out of this ugly phase and just left it for a day. When I came back later, I painted the entire page with a layer of titanium buff and added some pictures of mainly pink flowers.

That already looked a lot better. I decided I didn't like the look of the titanium buff and mixed white gesso with just a little bit of quinacridone magenta to achieve a light pink color that I painted around the pictures and across the page. I also pressed a heavy fabric stamp into parts of the gesso mix and painted that with watercolor.

Finally, I stamped randomly with my French text stamp, called the page "The Art & Soul of Spring", glued down some bits of texts I had cut out of German magazines, framed them with watercolor crayons, added a flower-shaped ribbon and used a stencil with differently sized dots and white gesso - done. 

I'm quite happy with the result. I hadn't thought that I would end up with this after I had got stuck in the "ugly phase". 

I hope everyone has a good T Tuesday and a lovely week.