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.

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!

I have had a few hard days this week, dogged with travel delays and medical stress. To top it all off, I have just lost one of my best clients, who has decided to bring the work I was doing for them back in house.

It was a real blow on several accounts. Financially, of course, but also professionally—I really enjoyed that gig. Losing it threw open an abyss of uncertainty, which is the last thing I need in these hormone-charged last few weeks of my pregnancy.

But I read somewhere that art can be therapeutic, so I decided to give it a go and put together a collage to crystallise how I feel—and hopefully shake off the blues. Did it work? To an extent.

Feeling sad collage

While I was cutting and assembling, the collage completely absorbed me, taking my mind off my problem. And I did feel better for conveying my fears onto paper. But the following day, the world came crashing down on me again.

So here’s hoping to a better week.