Wanderlust: planned serendipity

Series: Wanderlust 2021 #12

Planned serendipity seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but Carolyn’s class is a blank-page-block breaker that creates the conditions for something interesting and unplanned to happen. The starting point is to pick a few (she suggests five) supplies without considering how they’ll be used. I grabbed some acrylic paints that had come with a recent ScrawlrBox, a stamp (Tim Holtz illustrated garden), a stencil (Marianne Designs Tiny’s cat fur), crackle paste, and a piece of “lace” that I made using a mould and filler ages ago. Along the way I also used a couple of the pens and pencils that live on my desk.

I started the same way Carolyn did: covering the page with the stamp and adding some colour to each of them. Then I used a black marker to roughly divide up the page and used those lines to guide me in adding layers of colour both directly with a brush and through the stencil. Next, I tore up the filler lace and glued it down, added some patches of crackle paste, and left it to dry.

Some more layers of colour — including thicker paint on the stamped flower — and lots of scribbled texture and it was nearly done.

Because of the way the initial stamping was done, my flower focal point ended up being tucked right into the corner of the page. To balance it out, I grabbed a spray bottle filled with thinned down black acrylic paint which has been sitting on my desk for over a year and, by some miracle, wasn’t clogged up, tore a simple curved paper mask and sprayed shadow over the left side.

It was a fun process and the page ended up having lots of interesting textures on it. I think the “grab five supplies” idea would work well on those days when the mojo has gone missing as you don’t need to have an end result in mind before you start.