Leafdays

I am usually up for an art challenge, and Michelle Ward, of Green Pepper Press, is particularly good at coming up with one. So it remains a mystery to me why I have never taken part in one of her GPP Street Team ‘crusades’, as she calls them. Until now. Today, I took the plunge.

Michelle’s challenge this month is to step out of you comfort zone, and make art in a size you are not used to. It’s a good one for me for a number of reasons—my art comfort zone is pretty limited (I’d say 4×4 to 10×10) and I rather like being comfy in any zone of my life (my husband always urges me to stretch myself, but without much result).

Well, this time I did it. Michelle gave a number of options you could go about tackling her challenge. I decided to go extra small and, since we have yet to move to the new house, I had to use slightly different mediums by default (did I mention that I still have no access to my acrylics? It’s driving me mad).

So I made an inchie collage with watercolours and, you know what, I am rather happy with the result. It is pretty and, despite having to depart from the way I usually do things, it still looks very much ‘me’.

This is a blown up version of the inchie

The process of making the inchie was also surprisingly easier than I thought it would be.

I cut a sheet of watercolour paper into an inch square and painted it with rose and burnt umber watercolour. Now, I usually like to apply watercolour with a sponge to obtain a lovely blended effect, but of course there was no way I could use my huge sponge on such a small piece of paper. So I blended the colours with my finger instead and it worked rather well (though you wouldn’t like to see my finger now).

I tore really tiny strips out of a selection of high quality copies of my ephemera collection and glued them to the watercoloured paper, then applied some more rose and burnt umber (still with my finger, which by no was positively dirty). Once the whole thing was dry, I stamped a little swirl from my NonSequitur Memories of Italy plate using black ink.

Finding some suitably small images to collage proved the hardest bit, as I don’t have many. But a bunch of lovely roses, brown leaves and the same Victorian girl that is in my header were just the thing.

I glued them on using PVC glue and a tiny brush. The piece was still lacking something, so I first tried a sparkler, but the smallest one I had still looked gigantic on such a small canvas. Eventually, I settled for a tiny paper rose, which finishes off the bottom left hand corner rather well, methinks.

Working on the inchie taught me three valuable lessons:

1. a small scale collage doesn’t take any less time to complete than a larger scale one

2. In a 1×1 canvas, there is a fine balance between building in detail and making a busy mess. Finding the right composition took me far longer than it does when I work on a larger size, although I suppose it gets faster the more you do it as your eye gets used to it. For example, I decided against doodling something on the inchie because it was starting to look too full.

3. Stepping out of your comfort zone is enormous fun, and I should do it more often!