Secret

I started with a photo of a woman from an advertisement in The American Home magazine for January 1947, and began overpainting it. I overpainted more thickly than usual, because there was advertising text on her face and the paper was very thin and the text from the other side was bleeding through (when I do this again with paper from that issue, I may let the bleed-through happen -- it was an interesting effect).

It got to a point when I thought I'd ruined it, and then I just kept going and, wham! It was a tiny bit Gauguinish so I stopped. The paper is from the April 1933 issue of Hobbies magazine -- I just love the warm colour of it, and the tidiness of the rows as contrasting with the mystery in her face.

It just goes to show that I never really knows what's going to happen when I start to assemble my bits and pieces ...