Sunday Sentiments #6: Broken Wings

It seem ages since my last Sunday Sentiments post! Five weeks ago exactly because, quite unusually, November had five Sundays! But here we are in December with Christmas visible on the horizon. Perhaps I should have prepared something more seasonal, but my muse wanted to do this, and who am I to argue with her?!

This month's quote originates from a 1980's pop song. Those of you of a certain age might remember a band called Mr Mister.  They had a few hits and then suddenly disappeared into obscurity. I thought one of the lines from their song Broken Wings suited my project perfectly.

"Take these broken wings and learn to fly again"

To me, this quote carries the profound message that no matter what life dishes out, we have the ability to deal with the situation and carry on. If we fail at something, our wings may be broken, but we can recover and learn from our mistakes and succeed next time. If things don't go according to plan in our lives, and we're disillusioned or heartbroken, we can still pull ourselves together and soar towards the sky with sheer determination! This might take time, but we should never doubt our ability to succeed one day. 

I created this project on a canvas board. I first collaged  some raffle tickets and dictionary pages with gel medium and added some stamped images as well. 

Next, I used Caran D'ache Neocolor II water-soluble wax crayons to add some colour. I chose a yellow/orange/red colour scheme as shown below.

This seemed too strong and bright for a background so I muted the textures and colours by brayering some white and unbleached titanium acrylics on top. This is what I ended up with:

On top of this I introduced a strong magenta tone in the form of stenciling before adding the following elements:

• face made from polymer clay with a silicone mould, which I purchased on eBay. I dusted the clay shape with mica powders before backing. Afterwards I added some features to the face with permanent markers. 
• a metal crown charm (also purchased on eBay)
• wings cut from a heart shaped doily (I saw this idea somewhere on the Internet)
• a book page mounted on a chipboard shape for a dress to give some dimension to the body
• two strips for legs cut from chipboard and covered with stripy tissue tape (washi tape)
• dotted tissue tape to "anchor" the figure and to balance the top part of the design
• an image transfer of a dragonfly. I used CitraSolv to transfer a computer printout onto rice paper, and then cut around it. Rice paper is less translucent than tissue paper, but it still lets some of the underlying textures through and works great with this type of image transfer because it is highly absorbent. 
• word strips for the title printed from the computer 

I inked the edges of some of the elements before adhering with gel medium and shaded the outline with black brush tip Pitt markers from Faber Castell. I also inked the edge of the canvas. As a finishing touch I lightened the design with some script stamping using white acrylics. 

That's it really! Here's the finished project and some close-up photography to show the layers:

I hope you enjoyed this walk-through of my project. If you have a sentiment to share this month, please use the link below to attach your post. I hope to see lots of you join!

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