Challenges

So here I am - new blog - first blog post.  This is a challenge in and of itself.  I feel compelled to write something profound, but instead I am going to jump right in with how I created "One."  This was created in response to two challenges:  Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's Second Floor challenge, with asks you to use materials or techniques that are out of your comfort zone, and The Diva's Zentangle Challenge.  Julie's challenge was to create something around the word "Truth," and The Diva's challenge was to create something around Earth Day.  These came together for me in this design.  I knew I wanted to do a design around the word "One."  When I was little, I used to picture the earth from space.  Even then, I knew that we were one organism -- all the beings, nature, etc.  From afar, we were one planet.  But we had the illusion of being all separate.  I wanted to capture this truth.  To begin, I went right to the "Second Floor" to use a technique I saw on a You Tube video that terrified me (I can't find the video but here's a similar technique) -- first I painted my paper with Gesso and then squirted blue, yellow and white acrylic paint onto it.  Then I wiped it all around with a credit card.  This created a very cool background but I had to remind myself to breathe through the lack of control.  Then I placed Julie's chicken wire stencil over it and scrubbed off a lot of the paint, which is a technique from Journal Artista's video here.   On top of this, I glued a bunch of pages torn out of an old book, especially in the middle where the "earth" was going to be.  (All of this is terrifying for me, because I usually work backwards from a pre-conceived image, and here I have to let the art come through me...).  In the center, I sketched out the word "one" and the lotus.  I knew I wanted hands - and my sketches of them were unsatisfying so I created a stencil and pounced them with white and black gesso.  Then the tangling came into play.  To knock back the decoupaged paper, I sprayed and let drip Adirondack Color Wash in Stream -- a technique I've learned from Julie but still find very scarey.  I blotted it with a napkin, and then ended up decoupaging pieces of the napkin onto the paper!  I used a tree stencil for the branches around the earth -- but they looked too stiff so I used a white Signo marker to make lots more swirls and branches.  I'm so happy with how it turned out and thank Julie and The Diva for the inspiration!