Grief breaks us...

 I enjoyed started to print these cards the other week; and then had those moments when awake in the night wondering if they needed illustration? If they did what could I possibly do? And I had a midnight moment of maybe Kintsugi???  

Kintsugi is a Japanese art that repairs fractured or broken ceramics with gold and lacquer. The bowl is repaired, it is functional and it is beautiful.

So I turned to the internet for some examples and came across three different bowl shapes that I would test to see which shape fitted with the card the best.

I liked the flatter wider bowl form the best, so that became my testing shape.

I played around with watercolour pencils, with different colours and with a silver metallic pen at first (in lieu of a gold pen which I could not find at home). See blue bowl top left.

Another midnight moment, and I thought - what about gold leaf? Like I had done with the Circles of Concern cards??? Oh me oh my, what an excellent idea that was. Although you can see from my note to self above - less is more - the whole thing looked way too in your face when I put in lots of cracks and gold.

So I made a cut out template for where I should draw/sketch the bowl shape, which worked pretty well. I wanted the imagery to be similar in style to my other illustrated cards, most of which are pretty loose.

And then to the gold. I collected my box of gold leaf scraps that I have been collecting for over twenty years and thought  I would use them up in this way. Slight diversion - when I moved the box home I picked it p to put in a drawer and did not realise it was upside down. The lid came off and gold leaf scraps fluttered everywhere... it was beautiful and magical and so pretty, but also a bit sad. I managed to save and rescue quite a lot, but there are plenty of scraps that now linger on the floor and around and about.

What glorious bling!

And so I tested the scraps out - picking up copper, gold and variegated gold leaf and seeing how it went.

I was NOT happy with the variegated look, so it was back to using some squares of gold leaf I had been gifted ten years ago. I just preferred the plain, simple, gold.

These cards will now make their way into the new online shop. In the end I was really happy with the notion of repairing, making whole and strong and beautiful. How I hope we can all be, as and when we recover from grief...