LB2016 : Her Light Shines Brightly with Renata Loree (sort of!)

As I shared in my previous post, there were 2 options offered for the Life Book 2016 lesson from May with Renata Loree. I did the first few steps of the lessons together by adding watercolour to 2 different pages.

Next was to add the mandalas using a couple of different stencil options with gesso followed by a layer of spray on top.

My first completed Mandala girl looks like this :

Next up was to attempt a trickier face angle. Before I started to work on the next with the turquoise flower mandala, I sprayed TWICE with fixative to try and prevent the dylusions ink coming up through (let dry before you spray and between layers) NOTE even this was not successful...read more below

The other face demonstrated was looking upward - I tried and tried but it just looked weird, so I thought about what I really wanted from this piece, and decided it was about listening to what's inside my heart and closed eyes would do the job

As you can see, even 2 layers of fixative is not the answer to stop dylusions bleeding up but I quickly made my peace with it and love her face. I have enjoyed using stencils for hair, so went with gold metallic flowers this time - makes me think of Klimt.

I added some more pink around the page and from there the art took on a life of its own and bears no resemblance to the lesson! Hence my title with (sort of!). Love that I can add my own artistic voice to the Life Book lessons.

I decided I wanted to repeat the garden theme, so lay down a floral mask along the bottom of the page and then sponged over with green acylic.

And there need to be butterflies in my garden - they are symbols of Transformation... and some machine stitch also needed of course

Then it was time to add words

I've been thinking a lot lately about transformation from within.... self-love and development

Often I use found words from a large print book, but this time I used a Courier font that looks most like a typewriter - entered the words to a Word document, and then printed them onto an old book page and tore them out. Was happy for the bleed of the ink this time which meant I could layer a bit of the colour over the words by dragging the gel medium across. I totally love how she turned out

Click on the photo to see it larger, or go HERE to see my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.
Here they are together in my art journal