LifeBook Week17: Your Story, Your Altar

Week 17 of LifeBook brought us a thoroughly enjoyable lesson by Roxanne Coble. I adore her style! She combines intuitive painting with collage materials and applies a lot of doodling as a final layer. I did this project in record time and totally enjoyed it. This makes me think that I may have been doing intuitive painting the "wrong" way all this time, which is perhaps why I struggled with it so much. Could it be that using collage is what helped me break through the barrier? It definitely gave me direction and purpose, instead of staring at my flat painting asking 'what now'?  I will definitely explore Roxanne's technique further.

The lesson is titled 'Your Story, Your Altar'. It's made personal by the symbolism in the focal image. Roxanne asked us to think of a few milestones in our life and find imagery to symbolize those events. I put all my imagery into one symbol. The tea cup symbolises my move to England (a bit stereotypical, perhaps!), the triangle of equal sides is my marriage and family life (symbolising balance, compromise and harmony, not a love triangle!), the three port holes are the three of us in my family, the boat symbolises my journey through life (including my creative journey) and the circles around it stand for all my life experience so far, guiding me across the sea. Pretty powerful stuff, huh?

For the collage, I chose a magazine image of some sort of jewellery, which is now unrecognizable. I also used some stencilled tissue paper, scrapbooking paper and my own digital paper, which I'd found in my stash. Since none of my white pens worked, I used a china marker instead - I quite like that chalky look. I'm very happy with this page and I can't believe how easily it came together, considering that these types of "intuitive" projects used to wear me down completely.

Here's my completed page (photo #1), and I'll also show you the stage before adding the doodles (photo #2), as well as some close ups.