Don’t Stray From The Path

Hello friends,

Hope everyone is good and enjoying their Thursday.  Today I am taking a day off from mentioning any of the kitties, because… well let’s not go there, and just look at the art journal instead.  I am sharing another page from my October journal which is all about Halloween and Autumn influences.  This page started off like this other one, with a two year old (practically vintage!) gel print that I’ve had in a box since I made it back in September 2019. It’s another A4 sheet of paper that I have stuck down in my journal which of course means I have this white border around it since my journal is slightly bigger.  I used leaves from the garden to make the gel print and added a bit of bubble wrap stamping on there too for extra texture.  The teal bits are leftovers from other prints but the majority of the print was in shades of red since I was thinking of turning leaves at the time I made it.

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So that’s where I left it at the weekend when I did all my prep work for these pages and then today I pulled it out to work on it and wonder where to go from here.  I thought about drawing some trees around the edges and that’s when I remembered the carnivorous trees from the Nightside series by Simon R Green.  In book 5, Paths Not Taken, John and Suzie enter a Timeslip and find themselves in a meat jungle.  Here’s a few snippets from the book:

We were standing in a small clearing, in a jungle made of meat. The huge trees were red and purple, and the large leathery leaves had bones in them…

It was an alien landscape, like a different planet, and Suzie and I didn’t belong there. I felt… horribly alone. Already some of the meat plants were turning slowly in our direction…

She checked that the way behind us was clear and nodded. And slowly, step by step, we moved back along the path that had brought us into this awful world. The jungle watched us go, quivering with rage…

Creepy right?  So this page took a dark turn lol and thinking about the scene from that book, I drew some creepy trees but I flipped the colour palette from that in the book, so that my trees are black and my sky is red.  It made me think of Rain’s Thursday Art Date prompt for today, which is Alien Worlds.  That would be one alien world I would not want to visit!

When I was finished it looked like this, with the trees reaching out with their gnarly claws to grab any juicy passers-by – do they look hungry enough? Maybe they need teeth as well?  I wrote DON’T STRAY FROM THE PATH using paint pens, not sure that staying on the path would help in this scenario but it usually does if you are in a fairytale or trying to avoid being eaten by a werewolf – maybe LOL.

Here’s how the page looks with a light behind it.  I have my SAD lamp on today as it’s quite dark (in the middle of the day!!!) and it is working well to give me daylight and also light to see what I’m doing here.  The white patches on the gel print make me think of moonlight shining through clouds.  It also helps to show up the leaf printing more clearly.

So it could be a meat jungle on an alien planet or just as easily be a creepy forest on Halloween night, or a cautionary tale from a book of fairytales.  I’ll let you decide!

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, gel print, paint pens, PITT artist pens, white pen,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – The Colours of October – October Challenge – my colours are red and black

LeighSBDesigns – 31 Days of Halloween Hop+Challenge 2021 – Day 7

Rain’s Thursday Art Date – October Spooks – Alien Worlds – Paths Not Taken by Simon R Green (meat jungle Timeslip)

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