Today, I'll be moving my art room to Eric's. Yesterday was my last day working in my space here at "home". I started with the Something to Crow About weekly challenge, and that final product was not very nice, but it got those creative juices flowing, and after I did it, I created this piece. I like it a lot. Over the last month, I've been allowing myself to layer, layer, layer. Before this, I had great fear of that. Part of the fear, I'm sure, comes from my elementary art classes. Although we were taught all those shading techniques, we weren't allowed to change what we had set out to do. If we planned on painting a tree, that's what we needed to do. It couldn't change. My middle school art teacher wasn't quite so bad, but there was a right and a wrong, and we were so caught up in learning primary, secondary, tertiary, etc, that we didn't have fun. High school was a bit better, but by that point, I just really wanted to make clay "sculptures" I could then use as ashtrays. Of course, ashtrays weren't "legal" projects in high school, so you had to be real creative, knowing full well once it left school it would have to become something else.
So this layering thing is new to me, and I cannot believe I've never allowed myself to do it! I love it. With this one, I painted the page, added pages from a book, then started adding more and more layers. I like including a drawing, too. I liked how the last one turned out, which I think will now be named Cassandra, which was a name submitted once on the blog and then someone dittoed that in an email.
So layering is fun and exciting and you can make mistakes (which I do constantly), but that's okay because you can just add another layer and ultimately there is really nice texture.
It's kind of like the texture being added to my own life now that I'm deciding to get married, move out of my house and start a new life. True, I'm nearing a panic attack--no kidding, I've been fighting it for a couple of days! But that panic is based on the upheaval of my house. It's a wreck, and I don't much care for my house being this disgusting. Don't get me wrong, during the school year, it can get pretty messy--enough that I'll stop you at the front door and say you can't come any further, but right this minute, it's horrid. I mean there are boxes, and things strewn on the floor that I'm not sure what to do with, and trash bags filled with crap I didn't know I had and wonder why on earth I kept it, etc. It's more than the "house is a mess today, let's sit on the front porch." Trying to meld my household goods with Eric's is also hard, but bless his heart, he's letting me bring as much as I can to his house so that I have enough of my "stuff" to feel like I'm at home. His backporch will be my new art space. It's not very extravagant or "classy" ....or.....well.. it is after all a backporch, but it's a space, and that's all I need. When we put his house on the market, and buy a new house that we choose together, I'll have a better space, but for now, I can make do with what we have. After all, it's kind of like that ceramic ashtray I made in high school--it had to be whatever the rules allowed at that moment.
