This is my second piece done from inspiration from Creative Jumpstart 2017. The artist was Mystele Kirkeeng and her style is a folk art mashup. She basically collaged all kinds of materials onto her background and them painted over them  using a face as a focal point. She instructed us to see what we can incorporate from our collage pieces into our backgrounds.

This was as my first piece from this series, a real leap of faith for me. One of the hardest things is to give up on the fact that the face is  not supposed to look realistic at all (even though I probably can't make it look realistic anyway) :).

It's also comforting to watch how Mystele did her piece as there are literally no rules.

I started by collecting various pieces of collage papers.​

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I then decided to use an old portrait I had taken (centuries ago from when I was a portrait photographer) as a background. As I started pasting down my pieces I decided I was going to leave his eyes to incorporate into my piece. (This actually made my person smaller than I originally wanted)

I collaged everything down with matte medium and left the eyes in.

I had absolutley no idea where I was going with this piece

I started by drawing the outline of the face leaving in the eyes and just went from there. It ended up being a lady with a hat, in a garden, behind a fence, holding a bouquet of flowers and watering the flowers.

I added buttons with buttons punched from a craft puncher and flowers on the hat with a puncher as well. I didn't get to leave in as much of the collaged pieces as I though I would. The flowers in the garden are kind of there and a peeking through the fence  is a piece of the bicycle. But, as Mystele says...It's all O.K.

I also may end up adding and fixing to it as time goes on. (If I do I will post the update)