CALL OF THE WILD

I ended up overlapping two on-line classes during the holiday season this year, not getting very far in either one. One was Christy Tomlinson's 13 Artsy Ornaments class, and the project below is my riff on the one taught by Jeanne Oliver. Jeanne had found an image of a little Victorian looking girl with antlers tied onto her head, and painted something similar onto a birch branch slice. I had ordered some of those birch plaques from Christy's website, however they ran out before they got my order filled, so I had to improvise.

Lately, when I have been painting little girls like these, they have started talking to me. This one told me that she is the bane of her mother's existence. She said her mama was a very stern and proper woman, who insisted that she learn all the rules of etiquette and practice the piano every day, when all she really wanted to do was run off to play in the woods with her brothers. I could tell by the lift of her dimpled chin that she had quite the stubborn streak in her, and I'm sure her poor mother despaired of her ever becoming a fashionable young lady.

The other class I was taking at this same time was Junelle Jacobsen's Art of Holiday Goodness class. The first class I ever took from Junelle was The Art of Wild Abandonment, which spawned not only a whole series of Wild Art classes, but also a wonderful group of Wild Art gal pals, and the Wild Art Circle Journal project that I have been participating in. So, the fact that I was doing projects in both classes at once just might have had something to do with these words that somehow popped onto the page, before I realized what was happening.

Sometimes a girl just has to follow that call.