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Monday 17 December 2012

Family - It is the Heart!

Here is an Artist Trading Card I made for an ATC group I recently joined. We will be exchanging cards once a month. The theme this time is "family".   When I thought about what family meant to me and how I was going to depict my ideas, I was immediately flooded with words. So I ran with it.  (I can be wordy at times! LOL).  I love putting words with images.  

Family - It is the Heart!

Family is wonderful, but there are times when it is not so easy. I chose to put all the words that came to me - the happy ones and the hard ones.  Family is not a "Norman Rockwell" painting, but it is the heart and soul of who we are.  (By the way as I understand it, Norman Rockwell was not trying to depict the perfect life - he was trying to uplift people and give them hope.  I listened to a radio interview about him and it opened my eyes up to the meaning behind his paintings. It gave me a new perspective on his work.  Totally interesting...)

Two languages are used in my family.  My husband and two children are bilingual.  I'm english with a bit of french under my belt.  We live in a small french-canadian village which is slowly becoming less french, so there is a lot of effort to preserve the language and the traditions.  It's a culture I love, and also part of my heritage as my paternal grandparents were bilingual, so I'm behind them 100%.  The french words are a representation of this and how it is such a part of my family.  I chose to make my list of words in english because it is a lot easier to do five words in french than look up all those other words in the french-english dictionary!!!    

The background is pen and watercolor.  It is overlaid with tissue applied with a matte gel.  I love how the watercolor heart creates a stained glass effect, letting us see the words behind it.  The edges are rubbed with a chinese white pastel pencil.

It is going to a wonderful artist and woman in Georgia named Vickie Martin.  Her work is fabulous.  It's worth checking her out at http://vickiemartin.net/.

Hugs to your family ♥
 
--Leah

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