Active Quest: Mixed Media Mantras
April 28, 2015: Around this time last year I was taking Kelly Rae Robert's Mixed Media Mantras e-course which was my first immersive delve into mixed media. It was a really good course and dealt with mental/spiritual/self-discovery and healing and such on top of learning mixed media skills. I convinced my mother-in-law to join me in the wacky impulse to sign up for the class. We both had our own insecurities and reservations but the class was magical and helped us push past those poopy demons.
I was having a cranky week of my mind fixating on all the negative things and over-stimulating social situations. Then I pulled out a canvas, wrote an intention as Kelly Rae recommended in her course, and smeared paint and glued torn bits of paper. The intention is what you want to do during the process of creating whatever the piece decides it wants to be. "Release", which I incorporated into the final product, was what I wanted to do with the negative, repeating thoughts, the stress and anxiety, the pent up energy, and have it dump out onto the canvas and away from my head and body. As it turned out, that's exactly what I needed to do. After a mad grabbing whatever paper or paint caught my eye, I felt so much better. My mind was distracted enough by the act of creating, a relaxing thing for me, that it was able to move on and get over the dumb. The most amazing part was when I wanted to draw a girl and grabbed a ripped out page from a flower painting book and drew with the first pencil I saw, a purple Prismacolor Verithin and then when I stuck it on the canvas with gel medium, the lines brightened into a happy, vibrant violet. Later I was brave and painted in the face but left part of an iris (the flower) visible through that layer.
Lots of media used: glossy gel medium, acrylic paints, Prisma Verithin pencils, hard pastels, Faber Castell PITT pens in various sizes, Stickles glitter glue, stencils, craft glue, scrapbook paper, recycled paper, Sharpie paint pen, and probably other things I can't think of off the top of my head.
