Creative Playtime → Sail Your Skateboard!

I’ve been playing with collage. Our kitchen island is a mashup of canvas, papers, found objects, Modpodge©, and Fedex© printouts which don’t run when wet. I started with a rummage sale treasure, a metal world map which I glued to a long piece of canvas sprayed lightly in gold and silver.

I added papers of all kinds plus images: snaps from our Italian trip plus photos from my books on England's Queen Elizabeth I and Isaac Newton. I’m no artist, but this cutting and pasting is rather therapeutic, and my mind went on its own trip. A theme appeared: the moon (thank you #SolarEclipse2017) and sailing ships.



I got to thinking about the Spanish Armada, which the Kingdom of Spain launched in May 1588 in hopes of taking out Queen Elizabeth’s navy, invading England, and thereby asserting its standing as the world’s Supreme Power.

That didn’t happen, given a series of unfortunate (to Spain) events including superior seamanship on England’s part, plus the weather, which drove the Armada north when it wanted to go south. Eventually the Armada sailed into a storm off Ireland’s west coast that destroyed ships and left sailors stranded in Ireland. They mingled their genes among the local population, and their dark-haired, blue-eyed descendants are now the “Black Irish.”

Thinking about the Armada led to this blog post. See what you can do with an umbrella when the wind picks up. 

From Elizabeth I: the People’s Queen, "Sail Your Skateboard” (and learn a bit about the Spanish Armada.)

ps...I still have coats of gel and spray paint to add to my collage. That will be the hard part!