Living and Active

You may remember a while back that I posted a preliminary sketch for a piece I planned to submit to Somerset Studio magazine. I did mail it in, but I haven't heard anything yet. I hope that means that it will be used in some way, but it may just be that they're still going to return it with a polite rejection letter.

This is the finished work and I'm pretty pleased with the result. I ended up cutting out the sketch rather than drawing a new one. I painted the "vine" with layers of color and set it aside. The background paper is a nice watercolor paper that stood up to lots of splashing and spraying. Once the vine was glued in place, I added the text from Hebrews that originally inspired me. That was printed on the computer and cut apart.

Next I selected portions from the prologue of John's gospel. I hand-wrote those around the edges of the vine. The Roman numerals along the edges represent the Ten Commandments.

The bottom layer is a canvas panel, painted a darker green and splashed about. The blue "ruffle" is plain old tissue paper that I painted with a wonderful acrylic paint made by Lumiere. Their paint is beautiful and remained flexible when dried. This allowed me to fold it into rough pleats and stitch it to the watercolor paper with my machine.

Apart from the pressure of making something I thought was worth submitting, this project was completely pleasurable. Of all the artsy or crafty things I've tried, messy painting is the most fun for me. I'll let you know what happens as soon as I hear anything.

Till next time!