LifeBook Week47: Inspiration Bundles

I've skipped a few recent LifeBook lessons as I had lots of other projects going on. I may or may not do them at a later date - I like to leave my options open without committing myself. However, for this week, I did not one but two pages! The lesson was taught by Tracy Verdugo - whose intuitive style I have always adored but still can't replicate. Anyway, the aim of this lesson wasn't to replicate her project, but to find inspiration in various imagery. Tracy calls these "inspiration bundles". Mine came from a Vogue magazine, but you can use any images that you find inspiring. It can be just one image or a whole bunch of them.

Here are the pages I created and the inspiration bundles they stemmed from. My first page also had a dictionary page in its bundle, which I physically incorporated in the painting, but forgot to take a photo of.  It was a page with the word and image of  a 'keystone' on it, which became the theme for my picture. A 'keystone' is both "a central stone at the summit of an arch" and - figuratively speaking -  "a central principle on which all else depends". I like the symbolic nature of this. You could argue that your basic principles can make you blind to see anything else around you, which is what my page is trying to depict. I fingerpainted the deep violet flowers and used the graffiti image as inspiration for the stencilling. I planned to use the same colours (pink, red, orange) over the white letters and numbers, but in the end I preferred to leave them white.

My second page is less philosophical. It was inspired by the clean lines and colours of an advert and a woman's silhouette, which I used as a stencil (or rather the negative shape of it). The duct tape came into the picture at a later stage when I was looking for something to emanate the geometrical nature of the black and white lines. I used a permanent Sharpie pen to introduce the red colour. The bright green is an oil pastel.

Creating with these inspiration bundles was a real eye-opener for me. I like how these seemingly unrelated visuals can come together on a single page and create meaning or an atmosphere. I will definitely remember to use this technique in my journalling when I need inspiration.