Deeper Roots

Deeper Roots
Originally uploaded by Anna Maria Stone

The final lesson in Kathryn Antyr's online vision journaling workshop had to do with making a collage or mixed media piece about nurturing our passion. I haven't really had time to get into this class very much (I'm into too many things at once, as usual), but I had made a card for the first lesson and wanted to make something for this last one. My dilemma, however, was "how can I work on nurturing my passion, when I don't know what my passion is, and when it is constantly changing?"

Since Kathryn's suggestion was to more or less start putting together images almost unconsciously and then seeing what meaning might develop, I did just that. I tore a piece of a page out of a pamphlet, glued it down, painted over it, and when I had finished the background and face I looked to see if anything jumped out at me. The words I saw most clearly were the ones I darkened with a pen: the letter "M", "deeper roots" and "garden". So I added roots and branches. I thought about it and decided that this meant that I needed to quit flitting from passion to passion and drop my roots down deeper so that the plant, which may be drawing and painting, or something else, can grow and flourish. I need to think about this some more.

I'm finally learning how to play around a bit with Photoshop Elements (the cheaper mini-version of Photoshop), so the image above is the result of adding an effect called "dark strokes". The original scanned version is below.

P.S. The style of the face owes a lot to Suzi Blu, and the idea of drawing and painting over the glued down printed page to a Tamara Laporte video.