From My Word Bowl – 10
Last week’s Life Book 2016 lesson with Tracy Verdugo taught me a new way to find inspiration to create with. She introduced me to “Inspiration Stacks”. I love-love-loved the idea!
What is an inspiration stack? It’s torn sheets of ephemera, scrapbook paper, magazine and book pages etc. which are randomly assembled into stacks of maybe 5 to 9 pieces of paper. You use the stack to inspire your painting by taking one piece of the paper included at a time and use what you like about that piece of paper in your painting. It could be a color, a design element, a word, a sentence or a figure, what ever strikes you or inspires you.
I immediately put together a few stacks and decided to combine my word bowl words with one of the stacks.
You can see my word bowl words on top of the papers, which I have spread out a bit so that I can show you what inspired me in each piece of paper, as I created.
I started with the “plaid” like paper and laid down some lines on the paper in similar colors, to which I added some symbols from the Chinese page.
A little water was added to soften and blur things a little. After that I picked up the little piece of paper with the stack of books on it. I liked the face of the girl on the right so I painted her in. The green and purple colors were brought in from the scrap of paper that had another face on it. I didn’t want to bring in another face, but I did like those colors.
The turquoise paper, with all the little bubbles totally inspired me. I liked everything about it, so I added turquoise and orange and some bubbles. I also liked the white print on the orange band and so decided that I would use white writing later to write in my word bowl words.
The magazine page with the bright yellow shoe had many things that could inspire me, but for some reason, the trees in the painting on her lap really spoke to me and so I painted in the black tree.
I decided not to use anything from the paper on the bottom of the stack, except maybe to add a little white.
More paint, more shading, adding my word bowl words to her hair, making more “bubbles” and bringing a few of the symbols forward again made the painting complete.
If the words from my word bowl inspire you to create something, please leave me a little note below. And.. this week if you’d like to use my inspiration stack as your inspiration, please do!
