A Taste for Life

It's June and we have a new theme on The Documented Life Project 2015. It's Travel Journalling. Our art challenge for this week is: illustrative art journalling, and the journalling prompt is: take it away. I don't anticipate that any actual travelling will be done by me this month so I'm taking the liberty of mentally travelling wherever I fancy going. And to be a bit more practical, I'm going to places that I have images of!

This week that is Paris, because I have many paper napkins with a French theme. I used hot colours to counteract the cold temperatures here in Scotland and after putting down layers of acrylic paints (with stencilling thrown in) I glued on (using matte medium) images of the Eiffel towers from a selection of paper napkins. I also stamped on some French text (from ThirdShift) and a woman's image (from Cherry Pie Art Stamps). A mix of vintage texts was glued on, from a French encyclopaedia as well as from an Arabic dictionary (with lovely imagery). Then I grabbed my stash of cut out and saved images from magazines and the like, and found both a quotation and an image to accompany it which fitted together perfectly. Love it when that happens.

The dancing couple comes from Renoir's  painting Dance at Bougival, painted in 1883. It shows a real joie de vivre, and the text A Taste for Life seems to fit it so well. Then I added the words (also from a magazine):

"We have lost our sense of time...We have an idea that life is short and that we must go faster to fit everything in. But life is long. The problem is that we don't know how to spend our time wisely".

 The image of a clock seemed to be a logical addition. 

As you can see I did this spread in my Dylusions art journal. I am veering more and more towards making the pages for The Documented Life Project in there, rather than making a page to fit in my planner. And that is because I'm getting more interested in general to do art journalling much more regularly than before. I love getting the paints, inks, and stencils out and just starting,  and seeing where it will go. And I'm no longer fighting that urge which I was doing in the past as I had the feeling I had to concentrate on making quilts. Why? Who knows. It is my life after all, and I can do what I like with it. Perhaps I'm learning to spend it more wisely!

I also wrote some text lyrics around the figures. Spending so much time in my studio means listening to lots of music and when the challenges from The Documented Life come up, the first thing that pops into my head are very often song texts. This particular song Take Me Away is by Avril Lavigne and if you're interested you can hear it here.

As you can perhaps see I used a mass of stencils on this spread, including ones from Balzer Designs and Stencilgirl. I'm going to take some time soon to separate my huge stencil collection by manufacturer to make it easier for myself to know which ones I'm using! Oh to be more organized! But then again is that spending my life wisely???