Following Directions - Week 2

This week's lesson is to Redirect. To take the focus from the pieces used before and to use them in a new way. We began by under journaling, that is to write thoughts down on the piece. These thoughts will be somewhat hidden by layering. Next, depth was added by using a charcoal pencil and blending with a stub trying to keep the light source coming from the same direction. A few colors of oil pastels were applied over the shadows and on the collage pieces. The colors were blended using fingers instead of the stub. The last phase was to paint a gesso wash over the entire page, removing some of the wash if things turned too white. This was to give the page cohesion.

There's some discussion going on at the Strathmore class site about doing things "right". I had started to wonder the same things as I worked on my piece, but I duct taped The Inner Critic and happily moved along. I was thinking I didn't see much depth in my piece, until I saw the scan, and I can see the knight popped off the page.

Another revelation occurred as I was working on the piece. Somewhere, I had read that creating journal pages wasn't so much about thinking things through, but following your inner voice. Things have been pretty tense this past week, and I needed some strength to get through the end of the week as I tried to tame the dragon. When I first pulled the collage bits for this piece, I thought it was just going to be some sort of fairy tale piece instead of channeling my inner resolve.

Do you work on your journal from intuition or do you consciously plan all the pieces parts?