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.