Purple seems to be cropping up rather often in online challenges. After the purple and gold combo for Mixed Media Monday a couple of weeks ago, Wednesday Stamper is now running a purple challenge.
This time, however, inspiration struck a lot closer to home than the improbable collage of dancer-turned-empress Theodora, which I made for Mixed Media Monday.
Somehow, purple’s imperial connection made me think of my great-great-grandmother Caterina, a woman so formidable her own family called her Caterina the Great, after the Russian empress.
Caterina the great
She didn’t have the easiest of personalities. An aristocrat, she had a hard time adapting to a world where titles meant increasingly little. She once confided to a friend that “a man who is not a noble does not look like a man to me.” She also sent away a hapless postman who had dared tried to make a delivery to Mrs Caterina (rather than Lady Caterina) saying: “There is no Mrs Caterina here—there never was and never will be.”
Her children had a healthy dose of respect for her, and if they occasionally forgot to treat her with due deference, Caterina was quick to put them in their place. Once, she met her son, my great-grandfather Raffaele Alfredo, in the street. He made the dreadful mistake of not taking off his hat when he approached her.
“What is your hat still doing on your head?” she chastised him.
“But mama, you take your hat off to a lady, and you are just my mother,” he said.
“And what is your mother—a dog?” she replied.
So here is my little tribute to Caterina, who had the pride and demeanour of an empress, if not the title. Well, this, and the fact that my soon-to-be-born daughter will be named Caterina after her.
Some people have been kind enough to email me about the background paper I made for the pink and brown Theme Thursday challenge. I thought it could be fun to make the paper available for download so others can use it in their projects.
Free background paper for collages, scrapbooking and mixed media art
If anyone wants it, here is the Letter version (for Americans) and here is the A4 one (for the rest of the world). Be aware that both files, which come in high-resolution PDF format, are relatively big (about 10 MB) so they may take a while to download. If you can’t bear the wait, a slightly lower res version is also available in JPG format (here for Letter, and here for A4).
If you do use this paper, I’d love to see what you make with it—just post a comment below with a link to your blog or picture trail, or email me to let me know what you have done. A link back to this blog post would also be much appreciated.
Oh, and one more thing: I found the paper worked best when printed on a suitably thick matte paper.
Easter came and went and I am still pregnant. My doc seemed convinced that I’d go into labour well before we started munching on chocolate eggs—she even told me not to do any heavy physical work around the house to avoid an early delivery—but, unless something happens over the next couple of days, it looks like Caterina will be an April baby.
Well, the closer she is born to the due date, the better, even though these last few weeks of being constantly tired, huge and winded are nigh-on unbearable. But at the end of it there will be a new baby, pink and round and smiling. I was reminded of it—of the chubbiness, the joy, the wonder—as I put together a little 4×4 for the Theme Thursday challenge.
The prompt is pink and brown, which happens to be one of my favourite colour combinations and the one I chose for most of the baby’s clothes. So it was sort of obvious that I’d go for a little girl’s theme. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon an old picture of one of my father’s cousins from the late 1930s—she just looked so soft, cute, happy—that both the piece and my excitement at Caterina’s impending arrival clicked into place.
Whey-hey, new baby coming soon!
The rest came off easily—a rosy digital collage as background paper, two stamped images, including a reminder that “all tomorrows are in the seeds of today,” and even the prospect of carrying around my enormous body for three more weeks seemed a little less daunting. The thing is I am having a baby girl soon, and that’s just great.
I am not terribly good at bold colours. My preference goes to neutrals, earth tones or muted pinks and blues. Which of course made the Mixed Media Monday challenge all the more challenging.
Bold colours are a child’s play (not)
I did manage in the end though. Going against all my deep-seated instincts I chose a palette of bright pink (poster paint on white cardboard, sanded) with touches of orange and yellow (a digital collage) and that, in turn, dictated the choice of art and focus image. It spoke of a warm afternoon, a small girl playing, fun. So I finished the piece off with some torn fuchsia muslin, a deep pink ribbon and an old picture of me at three or four, caught wondering which toy to fish out of my treasure box. Which, incidentally, was a pale muted green. I guess I wasn’t much into bold colours even at that age!
Oh and just for fun, here is a little colour poll. I am curious to find out which colours you like, so vote now!
I stumbled upon the 4×4 challenge today, and decided I just had to take it. It is about using any Da Vinci lady (except Mona Lisa) in your artwork. I love Leonardo’s women, so I couldn’t let this opportunity pass—even though the challenge is up tomorrow.
Woman in stone digital collage
It was also the prompt I needed to finish working on a digital collage I had started back in—gasp!—December, and never finished. It uses three stamps (Woman in Stone by Stampington, clock by Non Sequitur, Alpha and Beta by Stampers Anonymous), which I stamped in black on white paper, scanned, resized, digitally coloured and layered to a sheet music background. Simple and fun—and I can’t believe it took me so long to complete it. I guess I had just forgotten about it until the challenge came up!
Niccolo is spending a long weekend with his grandparents. Funny how, although my husband and I were really looking forward to a few days’ freedom—time to work, create, talk, read and even (wild!) watch a film or two—we are already missing him sorely. We have been reminiscing at length about how he does this or says that—and he has barely left.
So it was only logical, in this nostalgic state, that I’d feel the urge to record the good times we had together at Easter. I put together a little mosaic of the egg hunt on Easter Sunday (the highlight of which was dissolving in water a special baking soda egg that had a toy inside) and our trip to an amusement park on Monday.
Niccolo’s Easter of fun
I’d like his life to be always this full of experiences. I can’t put it any better than Konstantin Kavafis did in Ithaca, which we read at Nicco’s christening and which I used as journal entry in this mosaic:
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches
Incidentally, this piece also doubles up as my entry for the Created by Hand challenge, which was all about using rubber stamps to create a background for any piece of work. I used Komodo’s Bamboo Lake and Welcome Back stamps here, which I stamped randomly on a deep tan paper. That said, I suspect only the Niccolo enthusiasts out there can appreciate it, but I had a lot of fun putting it together (and it eased the nostalgia a bit).
Well, after the doom and gloom of yesterday’s piece, something altogether more fun and light-hearted (although I still seem to be hooked on a green colour scheme one way or another).
Inspire Me Thursday’s challenge was all about wallpaper. We never really had it at home except for a very brief time when I was about 14 or 15 and my mother went for a very sophisticated beige wallpaper in her bedroom. Our cat loved it so much it shredded it to pieces in a matter of days—and when I saw the wallpaper prompt I just felt I had to record that momentous event, which put all of us off wallpaper for the rest of our lives!
Kitten loves wallpaper collage
However, I was rather short of raw material for this collage, so I am grateful I could find it all online—the vintage wallpaper is from Stock Exchange and the kitten from Karen’s Whimsy. Other than that, it was just a question of designing the background paper (a digital collage) and gluing it all together. Lots of easy fun.
P.S.: some of you know I am a writer by trade and a journal-keeper for passion. Now I am considering running an online journaling class for artists and scrapbooking enthusiasts. Anyone interested out there?
Last Wednesday’s challenge at Wednesday Stamper sounded deceptively simple—anything featuring the first letter of your first name, as well as, of course, a stamp. Something personal, I thought. Except that I hadn’t banked on it being so painful. Perhaps it is because I am going through a difficult period in my life, but I found this extremely hard to do.
Hope this caged spirit will fly free again some time soon
Initially, I wanted to use a picture of myself, but it started cutting too close to the bone. So I chose a picture of one of grandmother’s nieces, a cute smiling girl, and wrote the journal entry to the third person—as if it had all happened to her. It made the piece slightly easier to work on. That said, I kept fiddling and amending, changing and tinkering for nearly a week. I wasn’t sure about the colour scheme, but I wanted to have a bleak black, for how I feel now, and a lively green to symbolise my hope for a better future. And I wanted to use both a bird flying free from the cage, and my son’s artwork, because I need to believe things will improve soon.
I am still not happy with the result, but it is time to let go—before it becomes even more painful.
P.S.: for curious minds, the journal entry reads: Look at her. Sunny, smiling, happy. She believed she could do everything and the world was hers for the taking. But then she changed. Choices and circumstances killed the spark in her eyes. Like a novel Sisiphus, she pushed the boulder up the slope only to see it roll down the other side one time too many. Now she is bitter, lost, adrift. Tired of fighting and of trying to rebuild. But perhaps the little girl is still alive inside her and one day her eyes will sparkle again.
Ah best laid plans, and all that. We didn’t manage to make our trip yesterday, although Nicco still had a good time hunting for his eggs and opening the presents in his Easter basket. The silver lining of staying at home, however, was that I put together a little entry for Theme Thursday’s inchies and moos challenge.
I am not used to making something this small and it was rather interesting to try my hand at it. The upside is that it is superquick—instant gratification. The downside is that I crammed too much detail in the inchie, as I would have done on a bigger piece.
Digital collage inchie of my great-aunt Letizia (blown up version on the right)
I am entering it for the challege anyway, though, because it is rather important to me on a personal level. It is centred on a childhood picture of my great-aunt Letizia, who babysat me often as a child. My memories of her are sketchy: I remember she had hair of an improbable yellow, thread veins on her pearly white skin and a fragile, antique doll I loved.
She had no children and died relatively young, and after her husband also passed away, a few years ago, I don’t think we remembered her as much as we should have done. So this is my tribute to her memory, and a belated thank you for all the times she bore with me when I was a child.
