Life book week 5 - Game of Life

The idea behind the project for this week was to use the idea of a game board to represent the goals and challenges of the coming year. I originally imagined a game of snakes and ladders with achieving a goal moving you up a ladder and life's challenges bring the snakes. While this was a fun idea there was no way I could draw all of that!!
After a bit of thought I decided upon a siding 'Game of Life' style board and cut a piece of chipboard to create a firm base. I adhered watercolour paper and taped all of the edges. The background colour was simply a wash of watercolour crayon with gesso and then the technical challenge began. I drew up a grid of 1" squares on white card and then created a meandering path with lots of twists and turns. I cut away all of the squares outside the path to create a base and then covered this with 1" squares of patterned paper. I attached it to my base and added watercolour shading to create depth and dimension.
The board was embellished with words and phrases from Tim Holtz stamps together with printed butterflies.
The final touch was a pocket full of altered playing cards featuring goals for the year. I picked 5 things that I know I'll have to deal with this year and created a card for each one. I added a dictionary definition of the word on each card. It was interesting to read the different ways in which a word can be interpreted and I realised that the one reason I had picked the word wasn't the only way of looking at it. The other definitions were also goals and challenges that I wanted to address. I popped my cards into a decorated small pocket and added this to the top of my game board do that the cards will always be readily accessible.
I am so pleased with the finished piece and looking at it makes me happy to work towards my goals this year - bring it on!!