Altered Book Club Swap #8

Greetings everyone! Its's past time for this post. I seem to be running behind time on everything these days. Anyway, the Altered Book Club met last week with our 8th swap offerings. This time I had Cindy's Book of Secrets. The Book of Secrets was a difficult subject for me because I just don't have many secrets. I figure what you see is what you get. If I do have secrets then they belong to someone else and I don't have permission to spill those. I really don't like holding things like secrets, grudges or anger. They just get you into trouble. So needless to say after three and a half weeks of trying to find a subject it came to me that I do have one secret. This secret was not easy to present or easy to speak about. My secret is that I have a secret world. My secret world goes with me everywhere because it's in my head. My world is populated with people and creatures out of books, poetry,movies or total fabrications from my own brain. In my secret world I am beautiful, special, have magic powers and many adventures. As you might have guessed I spend alot of time in my secret world. I am happy there. Because of my secret world I can think up Fairy Detection Kits and wild art projects. But also because I spend so much time in my secret world often I feel just slightly out of step with the "real" world. "The doors of my mind open to a secret world rarely seen" In the photo above, the two strong doors represent the doors of my mind. If you open the doors you can see my world below.

To create my world I decided to present it as a fold out in Cindy's book.

Here is a closer view of the left hand panel. In the front is the fae maid beguiling and sucking the life from her unsuspecting knight. If you look closely you will find another fairy in attendance. At the top of the page is a tribute to the dragon riders of Pern and the white ship bearing Frodo away to the west.

In this panel the central figure represents me (I always have long beautiful hair and wear Medieval clothing) I am surveying my world which includes a mermaid, Pegasus and enchanted castle. On the very right of the panel is the flying Ford Anglia from Harry Potter (Those boys are goint to be in so much trouble!)

In the right hand panel is my handsome warrior. I won't even go into the comments made about his rather large sword! Above him is Gandalf the Grey. And above everyone's favorite wizard is my beautiful fairy in her enchanted garden.

I think that this has been one of the most difficult collages that I've done. For the first time I actually had to construct a world in which I could fit in all of my favorite elements and still have them make sense. By "construct" I mean paint. Some of the world was painted before the collage elements were added and some of it was painted after the addition of the collage elements.

I have to say that I was gratified when most people thought that my world was a place that they would want to visit. I suspect that many creative people have secret worlds. How about you?