Machinery of Night - Art Daily Cafe

Hi there and happy new week! Today I'm sharing my November Art Daily Cafe project with the theme “Under the cover of Night”. You can see the theme post here (link). I usually try to make an art journal page as my monthly project, but this time I made something else. Instead of a page I made a little altered tin with a night scene inside. You can see the original Art Daily Cafe post here (link).

When thinking about what to do for this theme, I got the idea of literally “under the cover”. I have been doing some altered tins in the course of this year and saw this as a chance to make yet another one. To put the night literally under the cover. Although, must be said, I could have used the journal cover for that, too.

When then starting the piece, I remembered a scene from the movie “Hackers” where a section of Ginsberg’s poem is quoted “—connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. That led to my ideas to machines, to clockworks. I was yet to use of the new stencils by Finnabair that has a gorgeous machine pattern and that was the perfect excuse to get it painted! I made the stenciled backgrounds on top of black cardstock and then added them inside the tin as I feared not to be able to make a nice, crisp pattern otherwise. To highlight the machinery idea, I used different gears and cogs as my embellishments.

To connect to the night and theme of this month, I painted the scenery using dark navy-blue tones. There are several different colours of blue mixed, but with the shine on top, the background seems more or less unicolor. An element really connecting the piece to night is the big, silver moon crescent. I made that using a silicone mould, painted it first with black gesso and then used two metallic waxes to make it shine. Normally I would have used just silver, but this time I wanted a bit of warmth to the box, so I used colour called “white gold” mixed with silver.

For the shine I used first of all metallic acrylic paints to paint my background. I also used metallic waxes to add shine to the moon and also touched parts of the machinery with them to highlight the shapes and textures. But the biggest shine of course comes from the silver glitter, mimicking stars, or stardust in the machinery.

Thank you for stopping by today! Wishing you a wonderful week!

Materials: Prima Marketing