Stretching high and digging deep

The weather was so hot here last week that the paint was drying on the brush! There was no chance that I could do any gelli-printing or gessoing on the page, so I squeezed paint directly on to this page and spread it around with a plastic scraper. It gave me a background of discrete blocks of colour rather than my usual merging colours.

Then I grabbed another colour from the paintbox and stencilled. These are not the sorts of colours I usually use together, either, but I was on a roll and enjoying my playtime :)

Standing back I decided it needed some yellow so I drew the circles directly with the dropper from the ink bottle. Now it felt more balanced.

Next came the stamping and the black fleur-de-lis over the original stencilling. At that point the page was crying out for a hand reaching out. I drew round my hand with a black pen, but it didn't show up too well against the colourful background, so I pulled out the correction pen and changed it to white instead.

Now it was time for the words. The hand was stretching out, and 'stretch' is my word for the year. I imagined myself stretching my hand up and the little figure in my head became off-balance. And there it was - I can stretch, but if I'm not firmly anchored, I will fall over.

I need to stretch high and dig deep.