Self Healing Art Course, Week 2 - Part 1!!

There is a lot to get done this week on the art, heart and healing course. We are altering a board book and the first exercise is a page dedicated to our younger selves and the wishes we might have had for ourselves at that age. The main technique that we are trying out is image transfer, a great favourite of mine.



I only have this one (easily available!!) image of myself as a young child which I have successfully used before in my artwork as a transfer so although it took me quite a while to find what I had done with the original (stuffed in a folder - it has now been properly scanned in to my digital files) I thought that this would be quite easy. Wrong!! We were using the acrylic gel medium method but I couldn't find my golden medium (sure I've got some somewhere) so went out to get more but could only find a structure gel by Galeria. By now I was champing at the bit to get going so decided it would have to do. I wasn't entirely unhappy with the transfer but the resulting image isn't very clear. Good job we were going for a vintage grunge look! The first transfer went on a bit wonky and looked rather small so I decided to repeat the image and added the words 'Where will you journey litttle one?' - I was thinking along the lines of there are different paths you can go on throughout your life and right at the beginning the choices open to you are endless. Yes, it's official, doing this course is making me a bit deep.



The second part of this exercise was to write out those wishes I mentioned above and add them to the page. The ones I chose for my young self, or any young person for that matter, are:

Home and Family
Friendship, Love and Passion
Confidence and Ambition
Strength of Body and Spirit
Creativity and fulfilment
Self Reliance and Compassion
Happy Memories and Hopeful Plans
May you never be alone, and may you always want what you have.

For me this has been a very positive and self-affirming exercise, even though the I'm not sure I am entirely happy with the artwork. Why? Well, although I don't think I had a perfect childhood, by trying to pin down my negative feelings I realised that the bad bits don't really have any effect on me anymore. What has been is past, what is, is and what will happen, will. I find that the circumstances of my early years that did hurt and anger me to think about 10 years ago or so have lost their potency. But I can recognise that they made me who I am, and even with all my faults and foibles, at the end of the day I quite like being me. So perhaps they weren't that bad after all.

Ha ha ha. Told you I was getting all deep and introspective. Right, on with part 2.