I took a big fork in the road in my 30’s after having been a stay-at-home mom for several years with a real flower-child organic gardening type mission. I suddenly took a full-time job and got on the career track. This is my alter ego still standing in the garden in the back of my mind.
I started with a collaged background and gessoed over a roughly head and shoulders shaped area. Then I sketched myself in pencil.
I used inktense pencils, paint markers and pens to add colour and words.
Another page for the A Layer a Day group on Facebook. This week’s theme was “secret identity” or that identity which we hide from the rest of the world. I immediately thought about my gaming character in “Lord of the Rings Online”, a hunter elf. But I also realized that this image spoke to the fact that I tend to hide anger but focus it in a laser sharp way like the flaming arrow in this page.
I planned to do this page with negative painting so started with a collage but I used very, very little of the background in the final version.
The question was “How do you identify yourself on first introduction”? My mixed media response is, “I wear many hats”. Like many people, how I introduce myself varies situationally so there was no simple answer to this prompt. I started with a charcoal sketch, roughed it in with acrylic paint and then took out markers and pens to finish it off. Lately this seems to be my “go to technique”. Lately I have been improving on it by either outlining in pen and erasing the original sketch or using a workable fixative over the charcoal before applying acrylics. In this page I had some greyed out areas due to charcoal contaminating the paint but I lived with it. Live and learn!
