Write Page

 In among all the madness of the past few days I found time to respond to the latest challenge on The Documented Life Project 2015. We're sticking with the April theme of Exploring Inks and Paints, and for this week are concentrating on Inks. The Journalling Prompt is: Before the Ink is dry.

 I started with a piece of cold-pressed watercolour paper to fit into my 2015 planner (sized 7.1/4 x 8"). Using black Archival inkpad I stamped on images of pens and ink pots. The stamps are from Alphastamps.  Using the Bubbles stencil from Stencilgirl  I oversprayed it with a selection of blue and green Dylusions and Adirondack ink sprays. I then moved the stencil slightly and oversprayed using yellow and orange sprays.I sprayed some water to make the inks move. Then I glued on the back of a vintage envelope with Edinburgh postmarks. The next step was to scrape some pink and yellow paints here and there.

Then I grabbed the white and turquoise inks from Liquitex and let them drip down the page, helping them along with the water spray. The vintage text came (as it very often does!) from a book published in the middle of the 19th Century: Proverbial Philosophy, by M. F. Tupper. There I found the very appropriate lines:

To be accurate, write:

to remember, write;

to know thine own mind, write.

This seems to be a forerunner of the advice in Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, where she advises artists to write Morning Pages: 3 pages of simply writing whatever come to mind first thing in the morning. And it proves that there is nothing new under the sun! I used to religiously write as she advised but have found that this works better for me when I just write when I feel the need and I do it whatever time that happens to be. And I agree with both Julia Cameron and M. F. Tupper: it's a great way to get to the bottom of what's bothering you. 

Finally I felt with all that writing, pens and inks a postage stamp was also called for. I opened one of my (bought on Ebay) stamp albums and found the perfect stamp on the very first page. It's just amazing how that happens. Of course, I'm not saying this is the only stamp that would have done. No doubt there are many others but in some way I feel this is the one I was meant to use!