So, I am now half way through the One Little Word class.
Half the year gone already...
I missed the July 1 Blog Hop for this assignment as we had a family affair to attend to. Sean's grandmother, at 92, had a little mishap that landed her in the hospital for the past 2 months. As the month end came around, the owners of her apartment were putting pressure on to get her out of her room at the lodge. It was obvious that she would need assisted care now and she would have to move out of the lodge that she had been living in for a very long time, as they wanted to get it rented for the beginning of July.
Needless to say, we were called on to make the 6 hour drive to move her things out of the apartment and into her new dwelling. And so, I missed the Blog Hop. (Sorry Ladies)
However, better late than never, right?
The assignment for June was to create 9 canvases using paint and collage. We were to use a chosen colour scheme that is predominant in our album. Right from the start, I used a map as my colour inspiration for my OLW album. I love the blues and greens and yellows.
Here is my interpretation of this assignment...
I decided to treat the entire page as one canvas and I wanted it to loosely resemble a map. Ali wanted us to create in layers for this assignment, and that is exactly what I did.
I started by spritzing the page lightly with October Afternoon Sprinklers in the blue colour called Miss Mary Mack.
I am still hung up on doilies, so I laid a doily down and painted gesso overtop.
I used a nice thick layer in order to add dimension.
Before it dried completely, I carefully lifted the doily off, leaving the gesso that remained in the holes.
Next, I mixed up a pale green paint with acrylics purchased at the dollar store.
I began painting the green in random areas with the intention of it looking slightly like islands or countries surrounded by water.
I painted right over the gessoed doily and I love how it left texture on my page, sort of like a relief map.
I was using an actual map as my inspiration at this point...
Next, I mixed up a pale yellow paint and filled the middle of my 'countries'.
Again, using inspiration from the map, I added red squiggly lines for a little punch. I also drew in the grey grid lines to represent lattitude and longitude.
Finally, I cut the page into the nine 2x3 pieces to fit in a pocket page.
At this point, I had fully intended on treating each piece as it's own little canvas by adding all sorts of embellishments. But as I looked at it longer, I decided that I didn't want to cover up the overall collage, or hide any of the texture that I had worked so hard to create.
So instead, after tucking each piece into the pockets, I added only a few arrows cut from woodgrain paper by adhering them on top of the plastic protector.
And then it went in my album alongside the May assignment and my first half marathon.
I have to be honest here, and say that I was relieved that the June assignment allowed me to play and get messy and did not require me to draw meaning and significance from my OLW.
Back in December, I chose my OLW to be Open. I felt that there would be a lot that I could do with this word to help me grow. However, now, 6 months later, I am finding it hard to continue to milk this word. Have any of you OLW participants felt that way at any point? What did you do? Do I continue on and see if I can squeeze new meaning from it, or do I abandon it and choose another?
Still love this project, just not inspired by this word at the moment. I guess I'll see what the next assignment reveals...
