lady macbeth

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad"

This is a collage journal page on black paper. The image is a vintage book clipping of Lady Macbeth.

I started the page with Naples Yellow acrylic paint, then crackled over purple paint with a crackle medium. I glued torn pieces of serviette around the outside edge and glued the Lady Macbeth in the centre. The border was drawn with Sakura glaze pen and black Sharpie. So was the text. I just made up the font as I wrote it because I didn't want to use computer font (I am trying to do more of my own lettering! Man, do I need to loosen up though!!) Then I drew around Lady Macbeth with the black Sharpie as well.

If you click on the image to get a closer look, you will see the cool textures from the two colour crackle!

mama

This journal page was kind of a result of reading Pam Carricker's article in "Cloth, Paper, Scissors" where she explained that her artwork felt like it was about a mother letting go of her children. Then I came across an image of an oldfashioned mother in a vintage children's book while I was looking for pages to send someone in an ephemera swap. She looked so calm and kind and knowing that I had to cut her out and use her. She was originally holding a door handle, but I put the lovely little bird on her hand instead.

The story it tells is a mother looking away and letting her children grow up and make mistakes on their own. The bird is the child that she is letting free. She has given her children all the warnings that she can, and now she knows that she has to let them make mistakes and find out for themselves. Looks like her son in the background learned a rather hard one!!

The quote is a line from Elvis Presly's song "It's all right, Mama", music and lyrics by Arthur Crudup.

The journal page is done on black paper with gesso and acrylic paint as a background. The collaged elements are a piece of dress pattern and images from three different vintage kid's books. The writing is painted in acrylic paints (it took a lot of layers to block out that bright blue underneath!!) and was outlined with fine black maker. The decoratons were stencilled acrylic paints, fine black marker, and white gelly-roll glaze pen.

Hope you like it!

souffle pens

I get asked a lot about my souffle pens, so I decided to do a quick post about them.

The pens are a type of gel pen that are done by Sakura. Sakura makes three types of gell pen (that I know of) Gelly Roll, Glaze and Souffle. I have a mixture of pens because once I realised I liked them I just bought anything I could get my hands on.

What is neat about them is the brilliant rolling end that allows the ink to just flow out magnificently. It makes them brilliant to use in mixed media artwork because they just roll over the top of the different surfaces you have laid down and just keep flowing. The colours are wonderful as well, and they really pop out when you get them on the right background colour.

They do have drawbacks, but they are so cool that I don't mind them. Because they roll you have to slow down your writing to let it flow out smoothly, the slower you go, the thicker the line. You also have to wait for it to dry properly, because it is a bead of liquid. Many times I have gone to work on something else on my page while my souffle pen dried, and I looked back to discover that I unknowingly ran my hand through the paint and it is now smudged. You also have to get used to which colours you can use over which background colours. Some colours will just disappear into other colours, but if you choose the right combination they will sing on the page and nearly poke your eye out!

Here are all the blog posts I have done that reference souffle pens:

http://mixedmediamartyr.blogspot.com/search/label/souffle%20pen

Kelly Kilmer is a pen guru in the art journaling world and here is a link to her favourite pens:

http://kellykilmer.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-pen-list.html

Well, I hope that this has helped all you out there in blog and Flickr land. It was a post I should have done ages ago, because I love these pens so much.