Because I’m working on several projects I’ll be demoing at a trade show in a couple of months, my workbench is pretty well covered with supplies other than what I would usually reach for when working in my AJA journal.

I didn’t want to have to do anything more than push some stuff out of the way to work on this week’s page, which is why you’ll see the occasional stray item in a photo.  I had no idea what I was going to create, and since my brain was consumed with the show projects, I knew I needed to find something reasonably simple.

A slight rewind… on Friday when I left the warehouse a packet of the new collage sheets managed to fall into my backpack.  No idea how that happened…

Once I got home I tossed them on my workbench and then pushed them to the side so I could work on other things.  On Sunday, as I was considering what today’s page would be it occurred to me that if I could use what was right in front of me things would be way simpler.  After thinking about it, I realized the collage sheets were nearly right in front of me, if you consider buried under a pile of unrelated supplies “right in front of me”.

So there you go, today’s prompt:  use what’s in front of you.

Never one to look a gift page idea in the mouth, I dug out the collage sheets, chose one I wanted to work with and was off creating today’s page.  I let the colors of the imagery dictate the background colors, though I have no idea what prompted the…

…idea to make the images stand in an oval.  Rather than overthink it I grabbed a pencil and sketched in an oval.

Grabbed some baby wipes and began applying color.  Dylusions Postbox Red Paint for the center of the oval.

And roughly filled in the what I’d sketched.

I knew exactly how I wanted the page to look, so didn’t even have to think about what to do next… add a border using the new Slate Grey color.

Then fill in the remainder with Black Marble.  I like this look, but it’s a little too loose at this point.

Ordinarily I don’t write on my pages. I’m not a diarist and never feel compelled to commit what’s on my mind to a page.  I did decide to write because I like the look, though what’s here is utter nonsense, beginning with “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”  That was followed by scraps of nursery rhymes and song lyrics.

This is better, but I still felt like the ovals were not looking quite like what I had in mind, so I used the same Sharpie Paint Pen and scribbled around the black background and the grey border, more or less firming up the definition between them.

I liked that, so decided to do the same thing to create more visual separation between the red oval and that grey border.  I added some small dots around the circumference of the grey border, which livened it up a bit.  (Do ovals have a circumference??  Ah, the things I wonder)

The collage sheet I decided to use was Masquerade III.  Here’s one of the characters in a test placement.

Masquerade I and II are similar, while Masquerade IV was smaller versions of all 6 characters.

And here they both are glued in place.  This page is not my usual style, for a number of reasons, but I like it regardless of its outlier status.  Who knows, maybe my style will expand to encompass more work like this!