Tell the Truth

The prompt on Joggles Art Journal Adventures this week was: Hand. As luck would have it I already had a stencilled hand to hand so to speak, probably done as a try-out for a previous project. It uses L231 Tangled Tribal Hand Large stencil by Stencilgirl Products.  It became the focal point for this spread in an 6 x 8" art journal.

The background was done by first collaging on the pages with 7Gypsies tissue wrap, wrapping paper, vintage imagery and text as well as deli paper stencilled with the smallest stencil from the March 2017 Stencilgirl Club.

On top of that I used Distress Crayons as well as fluid acrylics with the L491 Organic Roots Large stencil, also from Stencilgirl Products.  The quotation was cut from a magazine some time ago, simply because I liked the words. I have a whole collection of such cuttings to use if and when they are appropriate. This one fitted the bill for this spread perfectly.

Here are a few detailed pictures on which you can see the various layers even better than on the relatively small pages.

Just Do Art

The new prompt on Colour Me Positive was: Just Do It, and the art challenge to use a bright colour you don't usually use. That was a bit difficult as I  love and use all colours. Perhaps brown is my least favourite one but that is because it isn't bright. So in the end I settled for using as many bright colours as I could fit in.

The prompt brought me to the words: Just Do Art, and at the moment I don't need to be told that twice. In fact, the only way I can stop myself from going to the painting shed is to wear my neatest clothes that I absolutely don't want to get paint on (I'm a very untidy worker!). The desire to emerge myself in making art is great as it's the only time I'm distracted enough not to worry about anything.

I started making the background with very bright pastels and the L320 Batik stencil from Stencilgirl, a hugely versatile one, filled to the brim with patterns. It's now hard to see it on the pages but those patterns do peek through. I then did some rubber stamping featuring a cracks (designed by France Papillon for Stampotique).

I wanted to show one of the hands that "do the art" and used the L231 Tangled Tribal Hand stencil by Stencilgirl. Again this one has the hand but is also full of patterns and I'm particularly fond of the spirals. These were also stencilled around the head of the figure which comes from Matisse's painting The Hindu Pose (1923). I am saving her blushes (and am avoiding any potential nudity issues on Blogger!) by using the word DAREDEVIL on top. After all artists are daredevils in their own way. I also glued on the butterfly postage stamp at this stage.

Then I added further small patterns using the hand stencil again (for the small dots) as well as the large stencil from the October Stencilgirl Club and well as the medium one from April 2016. I also stamped on the blue rings from the Ring Hopscotch design by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer for Art Foamies.

The big words Just Do Art were added using the L261 Vintage Typerwriter Alphabet stencil (desinged by Carolyn Dube who also set the Just Do It prompt this week) and the smaller You Are Here saying that is L361 Are We There Yet stencil, also by her. I think that's all the stencils I utilized to make these pages!

I wrote on the following words alongside the hand that refer to our prompt. They read: "You are never ready for what you have to do, you just do it, that makes you ready". Along the figure it says: "Stop wishing, start doing, the time is now", and: "the most effective way to do it, is to do it". 

Vacant Hand

Amazing to think we have reached December already while outside the hollyhocks still flower and the last roses are hanging on. But fact is, week 49 of 2014 has arrived and our task for The Documented Life Project was to: Trace a hand on your page.

I can't even remember how often I have done this exercise over the years in a variety of art and personal development classes. I just wish I had kept them all. But at least I had preserved the last version mainly because it was used as inspiration for Journal Quilt no. 3 of the 52 Journals project. You can see it below and if you are interested it's for sale at £125. Just contact me by e-mail (address in the side bar). As the Journal Quilt is 10" square I enlarged my hand print and also changed the colour. The original hand was smaller and orange.

So I cut that hand from it's white background and adhered it to a gelli plate printed page cut to size to fit in my Moleskine planner. I used a variety of markers and watercolour brushes to integrate it further as you can see below.

It needed text (at least in my opinion) so I started to look for quotations about hands and came across this one by Sir Walter Scott in The Bride of Lammermoor. It's part of Lucy Ashton's Song and reads as follows:

Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,

Easy live and quiet die.

I found it on Saturday and have been thinking about this quotation ever since. Could it be true? And if it is, it must mean a difficult life and hard death for me, as my heart and mind are full to overflowing (although I sometimes wish for a Pause button on my thoughts!), my hands never still and my eyes full of wonder. Would I exchange it for that vacant heart, and hand, and eye in order to get such an easy life and death? No! And in fact how could you make that choice. Who we are and how we live, what experiences we have and what happens to us, is for a large part not in our hands. Even should we wish for a vacant life it's highly unlikely that we'll get it.

Who wants vacant eyes anyway when you can see so much beauty in the world such as this morning's sunrise. You can see the pictures below.  I'll take my chances with a heart full to the brim, hands always busy and eyes soaking up the beauty of the world. It is surprising what that quotation made me think about over this weekend. It took over my mind. Having it on the page will remind me of all those thoughts in the future.

My hands

During my Artist's Way class last Monday we printed our hands onto sheets using poster paint. We were then meant to go home and decorate them. Originally I had planned to print them out onto fabric and then decorate but due to the handbag affair I had lost a day already last week (migraine!) and didn't want to loose more time. So in the end I just used a combination of stamps and markers to decorate my two hands. My left hand (seen above) uses very sparkly markers (although the effect is mostly lost on the scan) while for my right hand I went for Sharpies. There is a heart shaped stamp at the centre of both, coloured in with Promarkers. The left hand also has some very sparkly decorations at the tip of each finger.

Hopefully my class today will be a lot less eventful!!!