I have lost the Plot

We have reached the end of The Documented Life Project 2015 and are staying with the December theme of: Storytelling with the written word. Our last art challenge is: Storytelling, and the journalling prompt: storytelling as an underlying fabric.  I honestly had a vague sort of idea of where this might lead me but I was wrong! The spread took me by the hand and lead me nowhere.

It started well enough as I glued on two pages from a vintage book on the facing pages of my Dylusions journal. I covered the pages with watered down gesso and used paints and all the stencils from our December club by Stencilgirl. You might get a glimpse of some of that. But as it happens I wasn't very happy with the result so went over the entire spread with gesso again,  and then wiped some of it away again with a baby wipe.

I added a lot of rubberstamping with text stamps  to provided that "underlying fabric" of storytelling. One of the stamps I used is an absolute favourite, Romantic Text designed by France Papillon for Stampotique. The stamp itself tells a story and I love the cursive font.

What to do next? I opened my box of vintage images and picked up two I like very much and had wanted to use before but they never made it to the page. Do they tell a story? I was meant to be storytelling, after all! I came up with: frightened maiden rescued by Amazonian warrior princess. But in all honesty by this time I had lost the plot, so that became the story. It was: Destination Unknown.

This of course was pure serendipity and by wonderful synchronicity the definition of "serendipity" was staring me in the face on the back of the envelope in which my good friend Lenna send me her seasonal card. That was glued on as shown together with some Dutch postage stamps that matched the spread colour wise. I have no idea what part they play in the story!

I added the text using letters cut from a variety of magazines. The very elaborate ones come from Flow Magazine, a new favourite discovered during 2015. I am looking forward to reading it in 2016 too!

There are lots of new things happening in the way of online classes including the new 2016 edition of The Documented Life Project. It will be completely different from this year and it will now cost $12, which is a snip! That does however mean that I will be able to say less about the themes and lessons here because of copyright issues. However for that price you can oh so easily sign up yourself. The link is here.

I have loved working in my Dylusions journal this year and will be loath to leave it behind so whatever happens I will continue working in art journals. I have signed up for various other projects next year (they are in the sidebar on the right) and will be picking and mixing them all up, doing what I fancy and leaving those lessons that don't speak to me.  In a way I'm sort of making up my own year of art activities. So exciting.