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It all began back in the autumn when I embarked on boxing up household belongings in preparation for having hard-wood floor installed in our house. You never know what can spark creativity, do you! As a hobby pianist and collector of minutia, I collect stacks and stacks of old sheet music. Why? Why not! But as I prepared for the emptying of the house, I questioned my choice of collections, not to mention my sanity. I detested the idea of hauling the boxes of sheet music to the landfill.

Instead, I hauled the sheet music to my studio where I brushed it with three coats of shellac, using the shellacked paper as a support for oil paintings. Then I decided to use some of it in a torn-paper, mixed-media project.

So I gathered up a cradled panel, white glue, craft brushes, brayer, scissors, sheet music, and assorted pages from various seed catalogs. Did I mention that I'm a gardener?

I began by covering the panel with pieces of sheet music. My use of "The Pretty Creature" and "The Little Girl That I Love" was quite intentional. (If you Google these titles, you'll find a little about these Old English melodies.) I brushed glue on the back, placed them on the panel, and used a brayer to eliminate bubbles.

That was the easy part! The hard part was finding, tearing, and placing the torn pieces from the seed catalog to represent my facial features. I didn't make many photographs of the process, but in the one process photo, you can see that I used a piece of a blackberry image for one of my eyes and a piece of an eggplant image for the other. Bright yellow flowers (I think they were carnations) formed the bridge of my nose as the light fell on it. 

A variety of images of tomatoes, peppers, beans, melons, oranges, peaches, roses, berries--whatever fruit or vegetable provided the color and value I needed for the planes of my face--became my forehead, cheeks, lips, and chin. I simply continued to tear bits of paper, glue them on, and build the form. 

I struggled for several weeks with the hair, trying to decide what would give it the structure and color I needed. I finally decided to use scraps of an old pastel self-portrait  and scraps of an old pastel landscape I'd sketched of my childhood home.

For a few weeks, I let it sit and dry completely; then I brushed it with three coats of amber-tinted shellac. Once that dried completely, I used oil paints to define the features, trying not to completely cover the fruits and vegetables. After all, I am a child of the earth!

This was a fun project! I have no idea how the finished product will stand up over time. But it will probably last as long as I do, and whenever I look at it, I smile!

Enjoy!