Gingko Stencil Re-Visited

In taking another rewarding online workshop facilitated by Jane Davies, I had an assignment to do something in a monochromatic color scheme -- my least favorite scheme.  I floundered around for quite awhile, before my eye fell on an old Gelli Plate print that had not turned out well.  I had used my 6"X6' stencil Gingko --

-- and as you can see, the resulting blue print was anything but sharp; I have had trouble all along with the paint drying too fast on my Gelli Plates.  But I tried to improve this particular blue print by spraying it with droplets of monochromatic blue.  (You can better see this by clicking on the top image to enlarge it.)  

When this old print caught my eye, I decided in relief to use it as the basis for a new greeting card cover.  (My 6"X6" blank greeting cards come from JAM.)  

With deckle-cut Friskar scissors, I clipped off edges from the original print, before gluing it to the greeting card cover.  Then I added the cut-offs as narrow strips across the upper left of the card.  Below that, I added two more collage elements, blues in two shades, cut from old catalogs and calendar pages.

The final artwork is far from a masterpiece; I was happy enough to finally come up with something that meets the requirements of this segment of Jane's weekly assignment-list.  As many of us know, the words "masterpiece" and "workshop" go together like oil and water.  The goal of a workshop is to equip ourselves with knowledge that will serve us in the future.  

What I personally learned from this segment of an assignment is that I will most likely never choose a monochromatic color scheme for any of my artworks.  Others can pull this off beautifully ... and my hat is off to those artists!  :-)