LB2016 : Mandala Girl with Renata Loree

Been wanting to have some time to attempt this May Life Book 2016 lesson from Renata Loree. She actually demonstrated 2 options of women with Mandalas as the focal, and I thought I might attempt both. With that in mind I started by adding my watercolours to 2 pieces of watercolour paper - since I am working in a recycled book this year, I need to do these pieces separately to get the lovely watercolour effect, and then they will be glued in to my book on completion.

Next was to add the mandalas - since I don't have a mandala stencil as such, I used a couple of different stencil options, with gesso followed by a layer of spray on top. 

First up was to make my sprayed area look more like a mandala. I added some green gold paint to the mandala and some touches in the background, and you can see I've already added some gesso to the area her face will be. Click on any photo to see it larger.

I started sketching the face, and this young girl appeared

At this point I decided to add some more stencils for background interest and inky paper for some extra variety

White and gel pens add important details to her face, hair, and on the mandala

Because my watercolour paper was smaller than my book page, I was able to machine stitch around the outside to add a bit more texture and add my chosen words directly to the background page

before gluing her in completed

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.