A Lightbulb Moment

This is the last spread this year done in the shed. I've spend most of yesterday moving all my paints, mediums etc. indoors as we have already had several night frosts and once frozen acrylic paints can't be rescued. There is still a bit of work to do clearing up the shed (just how do I manage to produce such chaos in a small space?) but all the important stuff is inside. I will have to endeavour to be tidier working indoors from now on till next spring!

The Documented Life Project 2015 is staying with the October theme of translucent paper. This week's art challenge is: Vellum, and the journallling prompt: Sheer Genius. The first thing I had to do was hunt for vellum. It's not a paper I use a lot as it doesn't work well with wet media and my pages tend to get very wet indeed. But I did remember I had some from the days I made lots of Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) and eventually I located bits and pieces.

The background was done with gesso and paints and just the one stencil to add texture: the Corrugated Lines stencil from Stencilgirl. I added rubber stamping (the man's face as well as my favourite French text) and washi tape with writing and numbers. Vintage papers and images were glued on using matte medium.

Those vintage papers weren't chosen randomly but with intent. The focal image is the Venus de Milo and she is surrounded by monks looking on in amazement at her, suddenly realizing what a genius she is, despite being a woman. The light bulbs come from the April 2014 Stencilgirl Club.

By this stage no vellum had entered the scene yet so I decided to add my title of the piece by stamping it on vellum, cutting it out and dry glueing it with a Xyron machine. The text reads: A Lightbulb Moment on the left hand page and She is Sheer Genius on the facing page. More interest was added by stencilling through circular and star shaped sequin waste.

Another piece of vellum I had discovered were the keys (seen above)  and these were added as shown with around them the hand written text: "finding the keys to my own thoughts". Outlining was done with a variety of black and blue pens as well as water soluble oil pastels. I had some vellum left over so punched flower shapes from that and glued those down, adding a little bit of pink and red sparkle (found during my search for the vellum) to the centre of the flowers.  And of course there just had to be a postage stamp.

This entire page was inspired by a quotation I found years ago (about 35!) written in a pub in Eton, near where I used to live,  on the wall of the ladies' toilet, of all places. There were no mobile phones to take pictures with,  in those far off days but there was no need. It has stayed with me anyway, stored in that amazing subconscious brain we all possess. Here it is: If God exists I hope she is safe in her heaven. Isn't it strange how such random things from the past,  suddenly pop up again in one's head, inspired by our journalling prompt of "Sheer Genius". This very feminist page is dedicated to a goddess from the classical past.