LifeBook Week48: Window to my soul

Renata Loree's bonus LifeBook lesson this week involved an intuitive process of finding elements in a random background and developing them into an imagery and theme for the page. We did this with a circular "window" frame cut-out to spot interesting areas. Mine is not entirely intuitive, as I merely developed a flower shape I spotted in one of my collage pieces, though it was still a random occurrence that evolved into my imagery in the form of a mandala-type flower.

The page contains inks, paints, stencilling, collage papers and doodling with a white paint pen. The background itself also went through a process of evolution and looked something like this at an earlier stage:

The top layer collage paper is actually a photo of one of my batik fabrics - printed on a laser printer. Using this technique makes your stash go further! You can scan in your favourite patterned papers and ephemera as well, so you will have an endless supply of them. Some people might argue that this is against copyrights, but we do need to draw the line somewhere, otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to use anything for our collages. As long as it's for your own personal use, I don't see anything wrong with it.

You can see my final page below. I really liked how that initial little flower evolved into a larger mandala inside and outside my window (the black circle).  I do believe that we all need to evolve constantly to make the best of our current situation and circumstances, rather than stubbornly stick to our old goals and ideals that may no longer serve our purposes and interests. In fact, I like this word so much that I'm thinking of adopting it as my guiding word for next year. 

Thanks so much for popping in today.

I hope your Sunday is filled with peace and creativity!