Mixed Media Collage: 'As in gleam'

Hello there.

Around this time last year someone, whose work has regularly appeared on my 'Top 5' type lists, contacted me, out of the blue, to commission a little something from me.

One year on I still can't quite find the words to explain how I felt when that email landed.

[Nope, nothing coherent is springing to mind even now. Try mingling excited with slightly dizzy then add a good dose of 'OK so who's tricking me?' paranoia; and you still won't be close.]

Rather embarrassingly, as I couldn't quite reconcile their request with ... well, with the kind of things that you expect to happen in 'real' life ... I did ask for assurance that I wasn't being tricked and that this was a genuine request. And I'm still cringing from that.

But hey, you know me, happy to have you laugh at me if it makes for a good story ...

So anyway ... once I'd decided that it wasn't a trick ... I got to work on the commission which was to create a collage based around a particular quote, from the novel Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller:

It was a quote that I'd used on a journal page I blogged a while ago, which is where they'd seen it, and they wanted something similar. But rather than simply replicate that earlier page I really wanted to create something lighter, brighter, something more delicate ... something to  reflect the wording of the quote:

Which all led me to using lots of white on white layers, with hints of pearlised paint, combined with stars and tiny touches of neon and glitter:

Meanwhile the wording itself was created - in true Snipped Tales style - by my scouring the pages of my books-to-be-chopped-up collection and quite literally finding the right words to say [something which this entire situation has rendered me unable to do!]

Appropriately I can't even decide how to conclude this post ... I want to say lots of things; things like ...

• how the collage now hangs on the person's office wall;
• how rather than taking payment we did a swap of works [which is worth more than anything I would have charged!]
• how I still occasionally say to James 'Remember when I made X a collage?' and then I laugh with sheer incredulity! 
• how it's a lesson in putting yourself 'out there'; if I didn't have a blog ... this couldn't have happened.

And, finally, it taught me that while there are some events in life you can definitely plan for, things you can actively pursue to bring success and satisfaction into your life, things you can decide to work on to help achieve your goals ... the thing is ...

... some of the most glittering moments that will come your way will be those that you simply don't have the imagination to have ever even contemplated!  

And you realise that Life's a far more creative story-teller than you are ... and, my goodness, has it got plot twists down to a fine art! 

Julie :-)