Weird is Wonderful

Time to work on the next spread for The Documented Life Project 2015 and here it is. We are staying with our August theme of: Faces, the Human Form and Characters. Our art challenge for the week is: Characters and our journalling prompt: If you're going to be weird, be confident about it. I do weird well! Comes from being a foreigner in a strange land! I found my strange characters in Vogue magazine so it's a sure bet they are very confident about it.

I started with a background of acrylic paints (including one metallic red one as well as an iridescent turquoise) and stencils from Stencilgirl. I used S296 Deconstructed Double Zinnia and S243 Merry Go Round and for the circles the Tropical Floral Stencil. Rubber stamping with text (from Tim Holtz via Stampers Anonymous) about dancing in the rain was added as well as the Crackle texture stamp from France Papillon via Stampotique and the lines radiating from a circle on the Thin-Lines Cube stamp from JudiKins. As I said the figures came from Vogue and I cut them out and used them as a mask from which I brushed outwards with white paint.  They were then outlined with black marker and I also outlined some of the circles.

The letters came from a stencil too through which I outlined them with black and then filled them in with white. I added the definition of weird (quite different from modern usage) from a 19th Century vintage dictionary to the figure on the right and gave her back her head as without the definition of the face she looked weirder than I had intended. The spread still needed a little something in turquoise and the 5 postage stamps came to the rescue, each portraying a bit of extra weirdness.

I then started to properly think about our prompt and contemplated a life in which everyone is the same and behaving in an identical fashion and decided it wasn't a world in which I would want to live. Give me weirdness any day! I'm quite prepared to contribute my share, specially as weird in ye olden days also had a connection with witch.