Wanderlust: river & rocks

The instructor for the third week of the “Rivers” theme is Laly Mille, a French mixed media artist (website, Instagram).

Now, this is a finished page that I love. This is built up of so many layers that I can’t begin to describe the steps required to create it. And there were a few points along the way where it felt like it could be a finished piece, but I trusted in the instructor and carried on.

I love how the rocks turned out: starting with dictionary pages and adding layers of paint and crayon and, finally, dabs of alcohol ink and charcoal shading.

I love the river bank with all the texture created from paper and fabric collage, and again, the bright drops of alcohol ink that just lifted the tree line at the end.

I even like the almost hidden journalling that I very nearly didn’t bother doing in the background. I did have a moment of worry that it wouldn’t be sufficiently obscured but, honestly, I wrote it and I can’t make any of it out now, it’s just more texture.

This project did, however, reinforce my annoyance with Sharpie for discontinuing the extra-fine-point water-based white paint marker. Mine still has a bit of life in it, but I cannot find a nice reliable opaque white replacement for it. I have a couple of markers that work nicely on non-porous surfaces, but nothing that comes close to the Sharpie for adding white detail over ink or Copic. I tried four different pens to get this scribbled border and they all just stopped flowing after a few scribbles or simply weren’t white enough…

Class:

• Wanderlust 2019