Remember

A new week and thus a new challenge on The Documented Life Project 2015. We are staying with our July theme of: Ephemera. The art challenge is: photographs and memories, and the journalling prompt: All that I have to remember you (Jim Croce). The remembrance part is close to my heart at the moment although there is absolutely no chance that I will forget! This ended up being a quite sad looking spread very much in tune with my mood. There is a story in there. It's a story that developed as I was working on the pages,  but I'm leaving the interpretation up to every individual viewer.

Here is how it came about. I started with a spread in my Dylucions journal where the pages had already been covered with turquoise and gold Golden liquid acrylics, left over from another project. I added more pastel acrylics to the page and rubbed the paint away using baby wipes and Stencilgirl stencils (Make Marks ,Random Marks and Juxta Pose). I also stencilled directly using the same stencils and Paynes Grey. I sprayed through the stencils too using Moonglow spray ink.Because this spray contains walnut ink together with a colour it produces a very vintage like effect.  I then glued on vintage images from a variety of sources as well as bits of a paper napkin with flowers. Once I was happy with the background I glued on the main imagery and outlined the head using a face from a magazine and white paint.

 I added the text from a vintage book. It reads:

There be secrets of the Memory, deep, wondrous, and fearful.

Is it then a dream, that I remember the faces of them of old,

Strive  to store up what was thought.

The postage stamps I added form part of the story of what we remember. Once it was all done I decided that it was looking too pale and needed an injection of colour. I started looking for a sort of cameo, at least that was what I vaguely had in mind. What I eventually found was a sheet of stickers produced by Artchix (now the shop sadly is no longer in existence) based on Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) we had made. On mine I had used the image of a vintage lady with a greyhound and that was the sticker that suddenly seemed the right thing for this spread.

It was adhered to the page using washi tape and I added the same washi tape in other places too for coherence.