People are like Puzzles: An Art Journal Page

Sorry if you've looked in expecting my finished ATCs and box.  I'm afraid that they are still a work in progress; I will probably add a little more to them each day rather than rush the process.  In the mean time, I've been trying to catch up with my art journal pages following the prompts over on Nina Ribena's Art Journal Prompts and More.  The monthly prompt for July is 'Puzzles' and week 4 focusses on word and number puzzles.  I still have two missing pages to complete, but I am getting there.

I started by finding a quote about puzzles that I liked - 'People are like puzzles, they take time and patience to understand.' - and the page grew from there.  I must admit that I copied Nina's idea for the first layer of my background.  I tore some pages out of the many puzzle books that I have lying around and trimmed sections of each page with my scissors.

I tore each puzzle into sections and added them to a piece of mixed media card (18.5cm x 19.5cm), sealing the page with Distress Collage medium, drying and trimming the edges.

I also knocked back the colour by scraping white gesso over the page.

I went my own way from this point onwards.  As the quote I wanted to use was about people, I found three figures from the Elegant Ladies stencils (Claritystamp) and placed them on the page.  To enable me to keep track of the layout,  I used Archival ink (Olive) and a blending tool to mark the outlines.

I removed the ladies and laid the outer part of each stencil in turn over the relevant place.  The jigsaw piece outline stamp from Sam's Shapes 1 was then stamped multiple time through each aperture in Manganese Blue Archival ink.  Once the stencils were removed, it appeared that each lady was made up of jigsaw pieces.

I sprayed Stick & Spray temporary adhesive onto the back of each lady and laid her back in place, covering the jigsaw pieces.  Neutral Grey Amsterdam acrylic paint was then used to cover the rest of the background and the ladies removed.  Before drying, some of the paint was lifted using a wet wipe to create a deliberately mottled effect and allow more of the word and number puzzle background to be seen.

I used a black, fine Posca pen to outline each of the ladies and decided to go over the stamped puzzle lines in black too, as I wasn't too keen on the Manganese Blue ink.

Each of the puzzle pieces was then coloured in using my Faber-Castell Big Brush markers in a range of colours.  I was careful to balance the colours across all three figures and tried to blend out the blue stamped lines at this point (mostly successfully).

To emphasize the theme of word and number puzzles, I used miniature scrabble tiles from a box from DoCrafts that I have had for some time, laying out four of the key words; 'People', 'puzzles', 'time' and 'patience'.  It was most fortuitous that the two pairs of words shared at least one letter.

The rest of the quote was added using words from the Chit Chat sticker book by Tim Holtz idea-ology, although I did have to trim the end off the word understanding to fit.