Wanderlust: lady in pink

Series: Wanderlust 2021 #19

I very nearly skipped this week’s lesson. The new theme is “recycled” and Kasia used an old magazine to create the base layers of her page. The idea was to find an image small enough to use for the focal point of the page and then cut or tear ever increasing holes in several preceding magazine pages to reveal the focal image in a sort of tunnel card effect (though all flattened into a single layer). The problem is that I don’t read the sort of magazines that are filled with pretty imagery and I wasn’t about to go out and buy one to create a “recycled” theme page. The nearest thing in the house is Empire magazine but, surprisingly, there was nothing that grabbed me as a focal image. After a week of occasional pondering, I noticed an old copy of the New European newspaper in my collage stash, had a flick through and found an article on van Gogh, which is where the central painting of the lady came from. I cherry picked a few other pages and created my base layer. Of course, nearly all of it got covered up so it didn’t really matter in the end — I am terrible at leaving collage layers exposed.

Some flowery tissue paper and a butterfly, both of which have been in my stash for some considerable time, and a few scraps of fabric for texture and my page was ready for a bit of colour.

White gesso helped to reinforce the shape of the page and provided a base for the oil pastel colour. I kept it simple by picking up on the touch of dark red on her clothing and using a pink and brown to echo that. And then I spoiled it by putting too much down. I did rescue it by adding black oil pastel over the top of some of it, but it still feels a bit heavy handed. The last thing I did was to add colour to the tissue paper flowers, using the light orange from the edges of the butterfly’s wings.

It’s far from my favourite page, but I’m glad I took the opportunity to play with a different technique and medium. There is always the chance that these things will come in useful in the future, either directly or as inspiration for something else.

Class:

• Wanderlust 2021
• Theme: recycled
• Teacher: Kasia Avery (website, Instagram, YouTube)