Stencilgirl® January 2020 Project

By pure chance we have arrived at a part of Ben Okri’s poem that has special resonance in January, a month in which time seems to be an obsession for all of us. Time passing, time coming, we think about time a lot more in this first month of the new year and in this case also the first year of a new decade.

If you want to see my previous illustrations of Ben Okri’s words you can find them in previous posts on this blog.  I try and make each spread very differently from the previous ones to keep it interesting but of course, these pages are all art made by me and that is a reuniting and returning element. This month we have arrived at the following lines: “Time is an act of consciousness: one of the great forces of the material world".

You can find a full step by step tutorial for this spread on the Stencilgirl®Talk website today.

Live With No Time Out

The new prompt on the Joggles Art Journal Adventures was: include a reference to time. I think I have fulfilled that mission with time quotations as well as clock images. I'm working once again in a small (6 x 8") notebook (with peacocks on the front) and have added gesso to make the pages more sturdy as well as gluing pairs of pages together.

  started with collage using vintage clock images from a Household Encyclopaedia as well as pieces of Tim Holtz's tissue wrap Postale. Pieces of a previously gelli plate printed page were added, on which I had used the L320 Batik stencil designed by Nathalie Kalbach for Stencilgirl.

 Colour was added with Distress Crayons as well as Distress Paints and Golden Fluid Acrylics.

I stamped on Time Flies (designed by Rebekka Erickson for Stamp World) and also used alphabet stamps to add the quotation "live with no time out"  by Simone de Beauvoir. The words were stamped onto that same gelli plate printed paper, torn out, edged with a blue stamp pad, and glued on. 

 Then I stencilled on the clock and parts of it using the large stencil from the April 2014 Stencilgirl Club.

Outlining was done with white and black markers and the pages were edged with a blue stamp pad.

Give Me Time

For our penultimate week of The Documented Life Project 2015 we are continuing with our theme of: Storytelling with the Written Word. Our art challenge this week is: hidden journalling, and the journalling prompt: the greatest gift I give myself.  It didn't take long for me to know what such a gift would be in my case: more time!  If you have been following my blog, you will know all about my time issues. I try to squeeze too much into my life with the inevitable result that I'm always short of time. No doubt 2016 won't be an exception to that rule. You only have to look in the sidebar to see that I have lots of activities already lined up for next year. As Stuart R Levine said it so well:

"We give our time away all day long, to emotions that gain us no advantages, to people who do not value our time, to inefficient habits. If you want to take back this time, you need to cut to the chase".

I will try! 

In the meantime I spend time making this page. I started by writing some journalling about time on the pages and then covered that up as per our challenge with 2 pages from a vintage encyclopaedia from the 19th century. These were gessoed and then painted over using Liquitex Glossies and a stencil from The Crafter's Workshop. I wanted the bars as a representation of how time keeps us prisoner all our lives and then kills us off in the end. The crosses (from the same stencil) also refer to that as does the skull.  Then I added the pink clocks (also a Crafter's Workshop stencil) with spray ink.  I found the face in a Sunday newspaper magazine and filled it with stop watches. They as well as the skull, the black birds and the wings all come from a Alpha Stamps collage sheet.

I used my Time Flies stamp (it features heavily in my Dylusions art journal!), designed by Rebekka Erikson for StampWorld and the Life is not measured.... stamp by Stampers Anonymous. The clocks came from a newspaper. The Give Me Time letters were rub-ons.

There are several quotations handwritten on the spread. Along the head it says: "Time is what we want most, but what we use worst (William Penn) and by the right hand side it reads; "I hear the heartthrob of time in my veins" (Terri Guillemets).

I used quite a bit of glitter mica spray to make the pages sparkle and I've tried to capture it on the photographs. The effect is better than the picture! As for the answer to the question: Want to live for ever? No, definitely not. I simply want to make more of my time and fit in as much as possible. I'm cutting to the chase!

This Moment

The latest challenge on The Documented Life Project 2015 was right up my street dealing with issues of time. We are staying with our July theme of Ephemera, while the art challenge is: Real Life, and the Journalling Prompt: At This Moment. Time plays a large role in my journalling and whenever I see the image of a clock in any magazine I immediately cut it out because I know I will want to use it sometime soon!

After the pale colours from last week's spread I decided to go brighter and this spread began and ended with gold. The first layer was gold paint and the last one a gold Mica spray. I also used a lot of red as you can see and that was inspired by the figure I wanted to use. You have seen her before (on this spread for Stencilgirl) and although she was smaller than I would have liked ideally, it still worked. For the background I used baby wipes to rub back the paint through a variety of Stencilgirl stencils (stencil from the February 2015 Stencilgirl Club, Random Marks, and Aztec Sun Large Stencil). Vintage collage elements were added and I rubber stamped the word MOMENTS ( from Hero Arts) on 3 times as shown.

Then the main imagery was glued on. The painting shown above  is by G. F. Watts and called Time, Death & Judgement.

Acrylic ink in a variety of colours was dribbled down the pages. I also added lots of journalling about moments around the spread. All came from my head but some of it probably comes from quotations stored there. This writing is mainly a message to myself to go back to living in the moment as I try to do as much as possible. I haven't done too well with it in the past weeks though!

The final touch was to add on the postage stamps. Somehow my pages don't seem to be complete without those.

Timeless

Our journalling prompt for The Documented Life 2015 this week was Time is ticking, and indeed it was, even though we didn't know it. I made this spread on Saturday afternoon when all was calm and normal. I now look back at it in wonder. It looks so happy and cheerful and so totally not how I'm feeling now. I have many journal pages dedicated to time and the speed of it's passing and I'm not superstitious enough to believe these pages were in any way a prediction of what was to come. They merely emphasize that we should make the most of every single second.

The theme for July remains: Ephemera, and the art challenge: focal point versus layering.

The background was made with lots of layers using acrylic paint and a variety of stencils, including some by Stencilgirl (the small circles one from Jan. 2015 Stencilgirl Club and the large clock one from April 2014 Club) Most of the stencils feature clock faces and numbers. Ephemera formed another layer,there are vintage images and texts, a paper napkin with vintage postcard imagery,  as well as bits of a scrapbook paper featuring a clock. Yet another layer consists of rubber stamping, all with stamps from PaperArtsy's Clocks 3 pack. There is a stopwatch, another one with multiple clock faces ( see it top left) and two text stamps, one reading: Time and Tide wait for no one, and the other: To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Once I was happy with all those layers I added the focal point in the shape of the running lady, and also added the chair (no idea why but it seemed fitting at the time!), the clock face and the words: Make it timeless.

The final step was to outline with black and white markers. And then I felt it needed a ship and water in the shape of the postage stamp to connect to the Time and Tide words. The discovery that some of the vintage text is about oceans was an unexpected bonus.

Posted with Blogsy

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???

8. Golden Chance Journal Quilt

It's that time of the week again when I upload my most recent contribution for my 52 Journals project. If nothing else this project has me more aware of time passing than ever before. I was giving a talk to the Peebles Embroidery Guild (I'm a member myself) last night about Journal Quilts and while putting it together I suddenly realized that I have been making them now for 8 years. 8 years!!!

And this is the latest one. I found the papers I painted, splashed, stencilled, stamped and adorned in other ways I no longer remember, over the summer. Read about the process here. What struck me was how often I have used circular objects to make my mark. I definitely have a thing about circles as is also evidenced in my large quilts. They are a symbol of eternity. You could walk on the edge of a circle and never come to the end. Somehow the curves, the symbolism and their connection (at least in my mind) to time passing (think watches etc) speaks to me and I decided to use the papers for this JQ. At first I scanned the papers into the computer and then printed them out to fabric but in the end I used the actual papers themselves as the scanning process meant that all the gold spraying etc. was completely lost and I so love my sparkle!

Fortunately the papers in question were heavy duty watercolour so quite sturdy as They were then stitched on as shown to a black fabric background and hand quilted following the circle lines. Then I added two layers of acrylic wax (you can get this from ArtVanGo here in the UK) to add more substance. The clock face (from an old watch) was added, beaded around, and filled in with Diamond Glaze. I found another wonderfully suitable vintage text to go with this piece. It reads: "Today is the golden chance".

After all, today is all we've got!

I added more beading as you can see and a black binding. It's a very stiff Journal Quilt but I'm not putting any restrictions on the JQs I'm making as part of my 52 Journals project. Anything goes!

Remember if you want to see them all, just click on the 52 Journals label below! Or check out the slideshow in the sidebar.

Time Flies

And there are days when I feel the wings of time more than on others. Today is such a day as it is the day now exactly 32 years ago that I first came to the U.K. Some years have gone very slowly and you wish them gone but other years such as this last one fly by so fast that you want to say: "Hang on a minute, can we rewind and do that again".

This is a spread done in my 2012 Sketchbook Project and as the title is so appropriate for this particular day I saved uploading it till today. The above picture is a scan but I also photographed this page for today's blip. The 2012 project is now closed for sign-ups but a new Sketchbook Project has already started, the Limited Edition, open to only 5000 artists. You can find out all the necessary information here and I made a start on this new sketchbook today. My theme for the 2012 one was monochromatic and every spread in the sketchbook is dedicated to a different colour.

The tree, as well as being brown, is also a great symbol for the passing of time with its rings. It is a photo I took in the Dawyck Botanical Garden back in autumn and on the right hand side of the page are the watercoloured squares you're probably familiar with at this stage.

Sometimes I spend a lot of time reminiscing on this day, more than on New Year's Eve or my birthday. Maybe because in many ways it was the start of my life as I now know and love it. I can remember some events on the day so well, such as how windy it was on the ferry. In fact, the weather was a lot like it is today here in Scotland. I also remember getting lost on the North Circular in London on our way to Slough. Some friends drove me across (sadly I no longer remember their names) and my first sight of London was at night. I was only planning to be here for 6 months or a year at the most, but life had other ideas! And I have no complaints about that nor any regrets!

Time passes

Two days without blogging! It's been quite some time since that last happened. And why didn't I blog? Well, the honest reason is that nothing much is happening and because of that the days seem to melt into each other. Sometimes I can't even remember which day of the week it is, let alone the date.

I read something somewhere recently (that's how vague I'm feeling) that time goes slower when significant events take place in your life. When life is more routine, it passes fast. Does it matter? I love the slow flow of these dark winter days, when all the festivities are done and dusted, and there is no sign of life in the garden yet. And the slow flow is going fast.

Time is used fruitfully with the start of a new quilt, thinking about smaller projects, putting the finishing touches on an article and reading a book about the ruined buildings in Ireland. The reading suits the season and time of year! So time is deceptive as even though it passes quickly it is filled with my life being lived.

I love such deception and my blip for today (seen above too) is another example. It looks so much larger than it is in reality. It could be a lake but it's only a puddle at the bottom of the railway bridge. The snow is melting, it's rained most of today and thus we have a small flooding. Underneath the water is ice. All is not as it seems here too!

AMLP: Photomobile

lion

Sometimes I do things on a total impulse. Something attracts my attention, an interesting e-mail lands in my inbox and before I can even think about it or give it some serious consideration or even consider if I have the time, my finger instinctively clicks that left button and the next thing I know I have signed up for another project. Yes, I could have stopped before clicking but all my life I have followed my heart, rather than my head, and so far I have never, ever, regretted those impulse, jump in and get on with it, moves. This one won't be an exception, as already, I feel the excitement building up inside.

Here is the write-up about it:

"Photomobile is a traveling library of photographs built inside an Airstream trailer. The Art House team will take Photomobile on an epic journey during the fall of 2011, bringing A Million Little Pictures to museums, galleries and project spaces across the continent. We'll be documenting the process of designing and building Photomobile over the next several months — stay tuned for updates and let us know your ideas!"

This fun project is another brainwave from the organizers of The Sketchbook Project and already (I only signed up about 2 minutes ago) I can't wait to get started. It will have to wait till my camera arrives. They send this to all participants and you are meant to take 27 pictures on this disposable model on a theme of your choice. My choice was also taken in a heartbeat and it will be: Captured in Time. I saw, I loved and I made that choice in just about a second!

If you read this blog regularly you will know that time fascinates me so what better subject could I possibly have found? Like the idea too? All you have to do is click on the picture above or in the sidebar and away you go!

The essence of time

How to grab time in a picture? My mother-in-law's cuckoo clock seems to fit the bill perfectly.

And once again I'm contemplating time and the speed with which it moves. Today is Troi's 8th birthday. She was one of 9 pups, the last one born and the smallest but she has made up for this by being the most stubborn one. What she doesn''t want to do, she doesn't, and nothing will change her mind. Nevertheless, we all love her! How can you refuse a dog, that looks this adorable?

The nature of time

Thanks to everyone for the good wishes re my headache. One day has made all the difference and as we had a very sunny day once again, we went off to the botanical gardens in Dawyck where I took all the pictures seen on this blogpost. They somehow relate to time in my mind. It's also where I always end up buying yet more postcards. They have such a marvelous selection. One of my purchases today featured the text: "Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf" (Rabindranath Tagore). And that made me muse on the nature of time and my worry about not having enough of it left as well as wasting it frivolously. Every moment we live is unique, it will never come again! What a frightening thought that can be.

Long ago, I had a lecturer who tried to explain the theory of relativity to us, students, and a thankless task it must have been, as needless to say we saw eons of time ahead of us once all those exams would be behind us! All I remember from this was that he had a book of cartoons that tried to put all Einstein's ideas across in an entertaining way. It talked about the 4th dimension and just thinking about it was so confusing that most of us soon gave up.

But one page grabbed my imagination and has remained with me through all the intervening years. This was the page that explained that in the 4th dimension events that are spaced out in our normal time frame happen simultaneously. The cartoon to go with this surprising statement showed a person in a car setting out on a long journey and then meeting themselves coming back again. Yes, I know! And please don't ask me to explain, it would be way beyond me. But at the same time it has always been a comforting thought to me and whenever I set off to go and teach faraway, I sometimes catch myself checking out the cars coming towards me going in the opposite direction (i.e. the way home again) and looking to see if I can spot myself! That apparently is the nature of time!