It’s Spring! It’s March! And it’s the 10th of the month!

Which means today my wonderful friend Riikka and I are going to show what we’ve been working on for our self-imposed challenge Inspired by! We challenge each other each month to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind.

This theme or thing can be anything: a film, an object, a painting, an artist, a city… and for this Inspired by we decided it would be fun to take the Oscar Winner for Best Picture.

This was a risk, because we usually know our Inspired by themes well in advance, but as you know the Academy Award Ceremonies were only two weeks ago. And there were 8 nominees, so we had 8 potential themes on our hands. What if the winner was a film that wasn’t in viewable in our local cinemas? What if it was the one we already had as a theme? Or what if the winner would not inspire us?!

Luckily for us, the winner was Birdman:

But we were also unlucky, because… oh (Bird)man!

This film is a mammoth as Riikka likes to call it. This was a huge theme to deal with for one measly Inspired by project. Not in the way of costumes, colours and décor, though there certainly is something there too. But what I mean is that it’s huge in the sense of the theme(s) the film addresses.

This is what I wrote down the morning after I had seen the film: It’s about the inner critic, it’s about that there is no escaping your faith, it’s about fathers and daughters, about putting human life in perspective, taking risks, humiliation, failure, preconceived judgement. Your worst nightmares. Fame measured by the amount of Twitter followers.

There is so much that I’m still thinking about what I saw… But what stood out for me was the inner critic. Because I have one. A nasty one. And it has been really loud recently, so I decided to write it a letter. On a scrapbook page.

I had to start silencing my negative inner voice right away because I haven’t scrapbooked anything in a while… The mantra ‘I’m not listening to you’ helped. A bit.

I decided to use one of my gelli plate prints. I love how intuitive gelli printing is and that the result (almost) always looks good. I also decided I didn’t want to over-think embellishing and to use some discarded bits and pieces that were already on my desk.

I’ve tried out new supplies and (new to me) techniques in the last couple of weeks and there was more than enough to choose from. None of these try-outs were intended to become ‘something’ and it was fun to make ‘something’ out of these ‘nothings’.

The particular ‘nothing’ I used was a piece of card on which I had applied alcohol inked Elizabeth Craft Designs Shimmer Sheet, Silk Microfine Glitter and Wow! Fab Foil with the help of a Elizabeth Craft Designs Transparent Double Sided Tape Sheet.

Even the photo I used was one I had taken for an Instagram challenge, but hadn’t posted because the voice in my head said it was stupid…

Conclusion: I loved the film. It’s really powerful and it was interesting to use a film like that for Inspired by. Especially at this time, for me, with my loud-mouth inner critic! Who BTW came back from recess the minute I noticed a spelling mistake on the layout… After I had scheduled this blog post… So I had to correct it and take a new photo… Oh boy.

I want to write: well, that’s it from me today! But that’s not actually true. I’m over on the Elizabeth Craft Designs blog today too, so there will be another post up in a couple of hours!

But first visit Riikka. I’m sooo looking forward to seeing her Birdman inspired project!