The latest theme for Mixed Media Monday is men, and as soon as I saw it I had no doubt. It was time to unearth the photographs of my grandfather, his father and his grandfather and do something with them.

The piece evolved naturally—painted and sanded cardboard for the base, a scrap of muslin rubbed with distress ink, a collage background paper made by scanning and juxtaposing vintage ephemera with a sienna canvas I painted a while ago, and, drawing the eye, the pictures of my ancestors.

Mixed media take on my ancestors for the Mixed Media Monday Men challenge

It is funny how they really looked like one another and yet I know their personalities were very different. Ferdinando, my great-great-grandfather, was a one-time soldier (a bad one, by his own account) and a fencing master who gave up the sword to become a civil servant and thus please my great-great-grandmother, Angela, a concrete, practical type who rather preferred him to have a steadier job. He had a quirky sense of humour and loved to journal—many of his entries are on the back of old military papers, or on photographs and are addressed to the descendants he would one day have.

Armando, his son, was an elegant, quiet type who died at 33, leaving behind a young, penniless wife and four children, who all went to live with different relatives. Nando, my grandfather, was brought up by Ferdinando and Angela, but none of Angela’s practical streak rubbed on to him. Despite a successful banking career, he remained a naive dreamer all his life—to the point that people occasionally took advantage of him. He was incredibly fond of children and animals and a really really good man. I still miss him—and I even miss the other two, even though I never met them.

Because when I was surveying my newly arrived Ebay purchases yesterday, not only did he spare some time to take a look at them, but he also suggested that we could perhaps visit a little flea market he knows of when we are down in Florence next weekend so I can look for more stuff.

Some of the lace and one of the verse cards I got on Ebay

Florentine ephemera, here I come!

Ever since turning three last July, Niccolo has displayed an increasingly competitive streak. “I am taller than Andrian because I eat more.” Or “I play football better than Uncle Paolo.” And, of course: “I paint better than you, Mummy.” Which, incidentally, doesn’t take much.

Better than Mummy’s paintings, no doubt

Lately, however, his benchmarks have become a lot more ambitious. We were reading Laurence Anholt’s Picasso and the Girl with the Ponytail a few days ago when he piped up: “I paint better than Picasso.” And yesterday he came to me, all seriousness:

“Mummy, I have to tell you something.”

“Tell me.”

“Did Leonardo da Vinci draw?”

“Yes, you see, most artists draw preparatory sketches before they paint and…”

My explanation was cut abruptly short.

“Then I draw better than Leonardo.”

Hmm, well…even a mother’s love is not that blind!

Another belated entry, this time for the Inspire Me Thursday challenge, which was all about including inkblots in your work. Unusually for me, I didn’t start out with an idea. I just went on, produced a blot which ended up looking like a butterfly and that sparked inspiration.

Sisters digital collage for Inspire Me Thursday challenge

I am not entirely sure what the mental association was, but it made me think of my grandmother Nina and her sisters. I have several pictures of them taken in the early and mid-1930s, looking happy and carefree.

It was a brief moment of joy, before their lives were turned upside down by the Second World War. They were all affected—one of my great aunts lost her fiance in the war and never married, my grandmother used to run across the fields under a deluge of bombs to beg farmers for scraps of food that she could give to my father and my uncle, and they all struggled to survive through each day. So I thought I’d capture those happy days before tragedy struck.

Incidentally, this started life as a collage proper, but then my printer died on me, so I scanned the inkblot and turned the whole idea into a digital collage.

Yes, I know it is a few days too early. But I finally got into the Easter spirit yesterday, when Nicco and I started making Easter cards.

Easter card (folded to the left, open to the right)

I decided to go back to a style which I had used a lot for my Christmas cards and decorations, but had somewhat neglected in later months. It is a combination of folding and panel layering that is very loosely inspired by the work of quilt and stamping artist Patti Pasteur, and stamping artist Loretta Lock, but threw in some other elements that I have grown fond of since the beginning of the year (I handpainted the base panel and designed all the patterned papers).

I like the chunky, satisfying feeling the card has—and I like even more that I got to use one of my recent Ebay purchases in it, a really sweet Bible card.

After a few weeks of the blues I am starting to feel more hopeful again. Must be spring approaching. Or perhaps I simply resigned myself to what was inevitable and am ready to move on and make the most of the rest.

Hope has returned and I have decided to capture it into a collage

Now I have a few ideas and projects I want to sink my teeth into. Wish me luck.

A hard day’s painting—trying his hand at canvas for the first time.

Green on canvas

I have a confession to make: I don’t much like purple (even though it is my husband’s favourite colour). So I just had to take up the Mixed Media Monday challenge to create something in purple and gold. I thought it would do me good to go beyond my favourite palette of browns, blues and pinks.

The combination of purple and gold immediately sparked an idea: Theodora. Dancer, actress, courtesan, she was born as far from the purple as she could be—but ended up marrying into it, and becoming one of the cleverest, most powerful empresses Byzantium ever had.

Theodora collage for Mixed Media Monday

So here’s my take on Theodora—a golden collage of her face (my drawing of the Ravenna mosaic) framed by sequins and stars on a watercolour paper base painted a deep purple. For some reason, the purple veered red in the scan, but it really is a deep purple in the original!

There is a woman out there who is my parenting hero. She is the friend of a friend—and the proud mother of four-year-old triplets and a two-year-old boy. If you ever chance upon her blog, you’ll soon discover that she has more energy and does more stuff with her four preschoolers than I can ever hope to accomplish with my single three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

Paper egg painted with salt drip

When I feel shattered in the evening—which, let’s face it, happens pretty much every day—I wonder how she does it. Oh, and she also finds the time to scour the Internet for crafty projects to do with her kids. The good news for me is that she shares her findings on her blog. Through her, I discovered The Learning Box Preschool programme and, lately, Preschool Express—a great resource for seasonal children’s crafts. I found a couple of really good Easter ideas there, which Niccolo and I immediately set out to try.

My favourite was painting paper eggs. Jean Warren, the woman behind Preschool Express, suggests painting them with a mix of tempera and cornstarch for a porcelain-like finish. But I suffer from a deep-set inability to follow instructions without making changes, so I decided to use salt drip instead. Nicco and I had already used it to decorate Valentine’s hearts and it gives the paper a lovely raised, rough texture.

So I made the salt drip (1 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of salt, food colouring and enough water to reach a dripping consistency) and we painted away. The end result made Nicco “really proud”—his words, not mine.

Wednesday Stamper’s weekly challenge is about drawing inspiration from your garden. Urban girl that I am, I don’t have a garden—but made do with inspiration from my (not-so-verdant) balcony and pot plants to produce this little collage (using a butterfly stamp by Starving Artistamps). 

Garden collage entry for Wednesday Stamper’s challenge

It makes me dream of spring.