Face Your Fears

And now for something a little different. This is a collage I did last night. Another happy accident! For a long time, I have been wanting to play around with this kind of collage, but no matter how I tried, the backgrounds always came out "pretty" and not very well blended.

With this one however, I told myself I would concentrate on building up the background with layers and textures, and not worry about "ruining" the picture. This seemed to work well for me, probably because I didnt' even have a picture to ruin! I had no idea what was going to go in the collage, ahead of time. It was a great experience, and pretty soon, I was lost in the process of creating, and amazingly not worrying about messing up. If I didn't like something I just covered it with more paint!

The way I did this was, first I slapped some gesso on the canvas with a palette knife. I didn't spread it everywhere, and left it in big chunks. Then I stamped some images into the gesso, which you can't reallysee now, but I'm cool with that. I drizzled some red paint on, and smeared that around a bit, and then just started adding papers, stamps, tissue, dyed paper towels etc.

I used a lot of the heavy gloss gel and that beaded gel too for more texture. I don't think I used a paint brush at all, except at the end when I spread on the string gel, which is like honey and apparetnly is great for this kind of collage. It brought it all together and glued everything down that might have been sticking up. While the string gel was still wet, I stuck on the thicker embellishments and dumped glitter in some sections.

I wish the picture was better, but after about 20 different attempts this was the best I could get. Obviously it doesn't show the detail real well, and there is a bit of glare. It's not a sunny day today, so the light in the house isn't great. Oh well. You get the idea right?

Overall, i'm pretty happy with the results. In fact I think I'll go try to do another one today!