The Colors of Life

It was a bit of a hectic day yesterday although I'm pleased I managed to fit everything in but I wasn't entirely happy with the emergency cowslip picture I produced for my blip and this blog. The wind didn't help it but there was no time or opportunity to find something else. Today I'm using another standby picture (as the weather is definitely not fit for photography) but I'm much happier with this.

During that week in April when we had all the wonderful sunshine I spend all my time outside making art in my Dylusions art journal, which meant I could both soak up the sun and enjoy the fact that my paints dried fast enough for me to keep on going. I'm going to show you the resulting spreads in the coming weeks, whenever I need to plug a gap here and for my daily blip. They are not necessarily in the order I made the pages but will depend on what I fancy showing you.

This is the first spread which came about because I wanted to use that lovely Mary and Child statue image which I had been hoarding for quite some time. I think it originally came from a Dutch magazine.

There won't be exact instructions for this one partly because once I get into the art flow I don't take the time to either photograph or write down the various stages unless I'm making art for a company such as my recent work for Stencilgirl. Normally I just continue throwing different things at the page till I'm happy with the end result. But looking at it in depth again today I remember that I started by glueing on music sheets on both pages, and covering it with Inktense bars, bringing to life the colour by adding gesso. I loved the vintage effect I obtained in that way. I collaged on some other papers including ones that I had previously painted. The next step was to grab a crackle stamp (designed by France Papillon for Stampotique) and a vintage sepia ink pad. When I was happy with how the pages were looking I glued on the Mary image as well as the eyes. If you have been following my blog for some time you will know that I have a thing about eyes.  Then I used a word stencil (by Donna Downey) and Liquitex spray paint in red to add the quotation.

 The next step involved glueing on those, much beloved by me, postage stamps and scribbling with a white marker, adding little circles and spirals as well as another quotation along the side of the Mary image which reads: "Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization".

Finally I added some sparkly gold spray ink as well as white splatters. 

I will try and remember to label all my posts about what I'm doing in my Dylusions journal with the label: art journal, so that you can find them easily by clicking on that underneath the posts or in the sidebar.