Divine Serendipity

There are just some things you can't learn from looking at and reading someone's tutorial (this coming from one who just spent two days pouring over back issues of Stamp Madness and Somerset Studio!) There is no substitute for the act of creating your own art. Stuff just HAPPENS. Call it serendipity or divine leading. You won't experience it if you don't put yourself in the place to have it happen. I am preaching to myself. I don't do enough art and spend too much time reading about it.
Okay, back to my point, which I haven't made yet. The two pages above were made from one cut out image. Or one negative and one positive. They are for an altered book 6 for 6 tip-in swap I am hosting for Christian Paper Artists (yahoo group). I cut out the beautiful romantic woman and set the scrap aside. Later, I ran across the scrap, turned it over and voila!, instant background for another piece, totally unrelated to the painting I first cut the woman from. In this case both images illustrate scripture from Proverbs 31, "the wise woman". Some of my favorite reading, because I am a practical person and Proverbs is the original book of pearls of wisdom.

So, before you throw away a piece of scrap, turn it over and see if the reverse side is something interesting. I have peeled photos out of old albums, where someone has glued them in and the back of some of the photos (damaged from the tearing out) were more interesting than their fronts. Or if you pull a piece of collage up to reposition it, stop! Where you tore up the composition may look better than if you replaced the piece you removed. My work can be so tight and calculated that I rely on the chaos and destruction of scraps and rejected items.

Divine Serendipity happens.