Yoni Girl

A few nights ago, I couldn't sleep and was up late watching YouTube music videos. I realized that there were so many songs I loved, and jotted their names down with plans to download them. The next day, as I was checking titles against my existing music list, making notes, and listening to snippets of songs, I traced the shape of my iPhone and doodled inside it. 

I took a look later at the doodle and wondered if it was symbolic, so I asked in my women's spirituality group if anyone had any insight on it. Moments later I realized it looked like a Yoni, an ancient symbol of female divinity and fertility. 

This is a close-up of the symbol doodled in my journal. 

I decided I would incorporate the design into a portrait, and use the symbols on the neck, as I had done on my old "Broken Chakra Girl" artwork from around 2006. 

The Broken Chakra Girl design was done on white cotton using fabric markers.

The Broken Chakra Girl was scanned, combined with several of my fabric designs, printed on cotton, and stitched for this art quilt. It was included in the 2008 book 1000 Artist Journal Pages by Dawn  DeVries Sokol.

I set to work tracing the doodle and transferring it to a piece of primed chipboard that had some pretty splashes of pink and yellow.

The doodle was traced, then transferred onto the neck of the sketched figure.

The painting went through a lot of phases. I couldn't get the doodle symbol to look right, and kept painting, then painting over what I had already painted, until I finally realized it was too hard-edged. I softened the symbol and lightened the color, making it much more subtle and feminine, and it finally came together.

The last things I added were stenciled leaf shapes with one of my favorite old stencils from my first StencilGirl collection, and a Rumi quote that popped into my head as I was painting. I had scribbled the quote on the back of the painting so that I wouldn't forget. I handwrote the words with a gray posca pen to keep the soft, feminine mood rather than grabbing a harsh black sharpie.

Here's some photos of my process:

The painted chipboard and my journal with the Yoni symbol.

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The design was transferred and outlined with black sharpie.

The symbol was too harsh, so I painted gesso over most of the design.

Even after layers of paint and gesso, the sharpie lines kept showing through.

I decided she needed a heart; it's color and wholeness are in sharp contrast to the broken heart on the figure from 18 years earlier.

I added strong brushstrokes of thick white acrylic and finally covered up the sharpie lines.

The painting seemed incomplete without adding one of my own stencils, so I used my Lemurian Leaf to hint at wings and give her a goddess feeling.

Above is the almost finished painting, before a favorite Rumi quote, "The wound is the place where the light enters you," was added.