Second Floor Gold Challenge

I have decided to participate in the Second Floor Challenge on the Balzer Designs Blog.  For at least this round anyway.  Challenge number one was Gold Paint.  It's been a long time since I've played in the gold paint.  Long enough that every gold bottled paint and stamp pad I had were dried up.  Ha ha!  Thank goodness for some old gold medium I found that I had never opened, the gold pens mom gave me a few weeks back, some gold alcohol ink, and my stash of Twinkling H2O's in which I had a small jar of gold hiding.

I had a hard time committing myself to the challenge.  Challenges irritate me like crazy.  However, this one was left totally open other than to use gold paint.  I spent way too many years on design teams creating projects with stuff I HAD to use.  It's always made me feel very confined, and still does to the point that even seeing the word "challenge" makes me run.  I had to talk myself off a ledge with this one.  I had to coax myself into really being open to the challenge and seeing I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted...and hey, how hard could it be to throw a little gold paint in?

And so I played.

Gold Pen Doodles

And I played some more.

And this is where I hit a block.  Not with the challenge, just a creative block in general.  These are extremely rare for me and usually disappear when I show up to a page or canvas or whatever.  Yesterday that wasn't the case.  That stupid block hammered at me all day long.  I had another project that just needed assembly so I finished that up and disgruntled with my lack of creative flow I called it a day.  Kinda.  After dinner and kids all ready for bed I perched myself on the couch to watch a little Diners Drive Ins and Dives and give it one last ditch effort in my art journal.  And here is what came out....

And here is the final product.

And what do ya know!  That block I'd been fighting with disappeared in a flurry of gold paint and india ink.  I just needed a little gold creative freedom.  And just maybe...challenges aren't so bad after all.  I will be digging out the gold more for sure.  :)   These pages are available in my Etsy shop as prints if you'd like to own them, or even just view more detailed pics.  Click here to view the Believe side, and here to view the Golden Eggs side.

Have a great evening everyone!  :)