Wanderlust: magpies

Series: Wanderlust 2021 #20

After saying last week that I have a bad habit of covering up my base layers of collage even when I want to leave some of them exposed, I made an effort to be more thoughtful putting paint down for this week’s lesson. And I really like the result.

There’s not a great deal of recycling going on here, apart from a couple of tags, oh and the tissue paper which was packaging for something a long time ago, but there are a lot of papers that have been sitting unused in my stash for ages. I chose mostly neutral papers and tags for the background and overlaid the floral tissue paper — using gloss gel medium which turns it nicely translucent, allowing the papers underneath to show through. The flowers and birds are all black and white vintage ephemera from Tom Chalky that I printed out and fussy cut. I put down a layer of clear gesso before adding any colour; this took the shine off the gloss gel and created a uniform surface to work on.

I decided to break out my Inktense blocks for the colour; they are translucent so you can still see the detail lines on the flowers and birds, even when I was adding black to the magpies, and they are waterproof when dry so none of the colours bled when I added the shading and the white on opposite sides of the foreground images. Before finishing it off with some light black and white splatters, I cut rough paper masks to protect the birds and flowers and restrict the splatters to the background.

There’s a lot I like about this page: the way the collage papers are still actually visible (even the white gesso doesn’t completely block them out), the way the black and white shading really makes the flowers pop off the page, and the magpies, which just remind me of all the magpies that live locally.