Wanderlust: rule of thirds

As I mentioned back in January, I signed up for Wanderlust 2019. The idea of being exposed to all the different themes, styles and teachers really appealed to me.

And I started off well, working through the background material and bonus lessons before the first of the themes. One of the lessons was on composition; there were a lot of things I could have tried out from that (and I may yet revisit it), but I just made a single piece based on the rule of thirds. I’d guess that most people come across the rule of thirds in relation to photography composition, but it can be applied just as well to any art form.

You could argue — and I have said this to myself — that butterflies and flowers are a bit of a cliched subject in art journaling and the like. And I have tended to avoid butterflies in particular for that reason. (Flowers on cards are a different matter, I love my Power Poppy digi stamps too much not to use those!)

But then I changed my mind. I decided I didn’t care if they are “too common” and cliched. Butterflies were a part of my childhood. When I was young, mum looked after our garden and we had a lot of plants that would attract butterflies in the summer and I would keep jars with foliage and caterpillars in and would watch them pupate and turn into butterflies.

There are things I like about this, but the biggest lesson is that these are lessons, they are practice pieces done with the aim of learning something. The biggest lesson is that not everything has to be worthy of framing to be valuable.

Class:

• Wanderlust 2019 – pre-class
  (made in January 2019)