Cry me a River

The Documented Life Project 2015 theme's for April remains: exploring inks and paints. And the Art Challenge this week is: Acrylics while the journaling prompt tells us to: Cry me a River. Acrylics are my favourite art medium so that wasn't hard to do. I thought about the journalling prompt long and hard and overnight from Saturday to Sunday I contemplated how to picture it. That's when the idea came of making the entire page a river and then isolate tear drops from it. Tears fall from eyes so adding an eye seemed logically (and I also love eyes in art!).

The entire page was painting with short brush strokes and using a wide variety of water coloured acrylics. Then I grabbed, entirely at random, a old book page, drew an eye on it, cut it out and glued it onto the page. I was so pleased when I discovered the words "impressions of the outer world" just above the pupil. Sometimes the universe hands out such gifts and all you can do is be grateful.

 I then made 3 different sized tear drop masks (by folding paper, drawing one side of the shape and cutting it out) and filled the rest of the page drawing around those tear drops using a permanent black marker.

The next step was to paint around the tear drops with azure coloured Silks semi-gloss acrylic glaze. It worked better than I could have imagined. As it is only semi opaque you can still see the previous acrylic paint marks through it. I outlined the tears with with markers and iridescent white oil pastel. Finally I wrote the title with a white marker at top right.