Below is Spirit Animal. It's (another) one of the pieces that didn't turn out exactly as I imagined it. I thought of having the tiger background with all these orchid and exotic flower cut outs dotting it. However, my lack of patience did me in, (I could only cut out so many flowers before the peaceful delicate blooms made me very very angry with an exacto knife in my hand) and then what I did have didn't look right (too many flowers (heh) and very gaudy).
So without the number of blooms I'd imagined and unhappy with its appearance....I thought about the person I was planning to send it to and got this:
A tiger with a flower barrette. (Of note: I used another piece of card paper to back this when scanning....)
This is made from coral colored card stock, a tiger graphic from a newspaper-like thingy and magazine flowers. I started with a plain old glue stick and end up warping it when I applied the gel medium, which I swiftly combated by smoothing it back out and then layering on gel medium (thicker than any makeup used on Broadway...including Cats. In fact, if you see the white-ish looking sections above is where it wasn't completely dry when I scanned it).
In a way it really is more than simply a tiger with a hair trinket especially when I think of its title, Spirit Animal, together with the image of this fierce tiger with the flower in its hair. I had one of the moments where I was layering on the gel medium, thinking of the receiver and it was just seemed so perfect.
This was a fierce person who can be extremely restive or boldly defending and has a feminine style which is a part of her that isn't as blatant as the rest of her tiger-ish personality but is there in more subtle smaller things. (Note: I don't mean style simply in the clothing sense or physical appearance. I would explain it more but I can't...it's that French saying, a certain je ne sais quoi. (Do I automatically sounds smarter by using a French phrase? My guess is no because with my luck I used it incorrectly...))
Time to throw a little deep, or not so deep ("after all you expect the puddle to deepen, into...I don't know, a deeper puddle..." some book I read some time), thought into this:
I think the hardest thing to reconcile is the difference between how you see your self and the way other people perceive you. Often times you can miss all the good when you look in the mirror (which is probably okay sometimes because if you thought you were the most fabulous creature every time you looked in the mirror, you'd be unbearable to be around).
Anyways. I guess it comes down to Spirit Animal being a positive representation of a friend.... I like it and it turned out better than I had imagined.
