Hi there and sweet Thursday! Today I'm sharing a project I did for the Art Daily Cafe blog this month. You can see the original post here (link) and the theme of the month announcement post here (link).
I keep a paper pouch on top of my bureau where I stash treasures. I put clothing tags, decorative wrappings, and beautiful receipts there. With one exception, all the paper pieces in this spread came from there.
That kind of pouch or stash was handy with this month’s theme of recycling. Although recycling could be so much more than just adding pieces of paper to the page. I could have used tea as colorant from old tea bags, or I could have stamped using packaging going to the bin, or I could have used an object as my base and give it a new life. However, I chose to go with a journal page and rummaged through my stash of clothing tags and other paper ephemera.
Both key elements are from that pouch. The lady on the right page is a business card by mixed media and encaustic artist Janet Reid. I recently bought one of her pieces and put the business card that came with the work to my treasure chest. The title on the left page is a clothing tag, from a Christmas lingerie gift. The other part of that tag is placed underneath the photo on the right, the tag with the black ribbon. The tile like embellishments on the spread are cut from a decorative paper bag, in which some postcards were packaged in an art museum in Mänttä. And there’s pieces of used and dried tea bags as well.
Even the base for the pages is recycled in a way. I love my journals bulky, and they tend to turn that way quite fast as I love building dimensional layers. For the bulkiness and dimension, I love to use spiral bound journals as they handle the ever-growing thickness better than regular binding. However, one of my journals was shrieking for help as I had done several dimensional pages to it. To help out, I took some of the blank pages away to give a little bit more wiggle space. Those torn away pages I then cut a bit smaller and adhered here. I also used the cut-out pieces in the layers. I guess you can see the notebook binding edge the best.
I just love layers, so the “multi-layering” in this month’s theme wasn’t a problem. I tried to keep that theme in mind, however, and added both flat and dimensional layers to the background and also to the clusters behind the key elements. I used collaging as my first layer, added colors on top, then some doodling, another layer of collaging… So, I tried to build layer upon layer upon layer. Even more so than usually.
I incorporated the minty color to the spread a couple of ways. First, I used white gesso in combination with mint when painting the background. The other minty colored element is the washi tape. I happened to have a brand-new roll of tape in perfect minty color, which I opened. I saved the decorative packaging label of the roll and included it to my clusters; cut in half so I got a piece to both pages. The tape I used in the collage layer underneath the paint. You can see that better in the close-up photos. I also doodled using a dark minty colored acrylic marker.
Thank you for stopping by today! My tip today is to start collecting an ephemera bag if you don’t already have one!
Materials: Prima Marketing, Stencil Girl, Posca, Tape Garden
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