Documented Life Project - April Theme
Color Safari (Exploring Inks and Paints)
April 4
Art Challenge: Watercolors
Journal Prompt: It's Water Under the Bridge
The journal prompt for this week was "timely." I had just finished watching the season finale of "Army of the Red Monkeys" and I was obsessed with the idea of the nature of time. Does time go by so that the past is water under the bridge or does time have a cycle. Can you let the past go since everything you are is a composite of what has come before? Or if you could alter something in the past, would you, and change your outcome? Making a simple metaphor complex, I began my entry.
I began with my usual step of coating the pages with gesso and scribbling the prompt to remind me. Thinking of watercolors, I wanted to reserve some white space so I used tape to mask areas. I splashed liquid watercolors around the page, and when that wasn't intense enough, I sprayed randomly with the Dylusion Inks. I love the vibrance of these inks, but they are so responsive to liquid that I had to set them, first with Workable Fix, then MatteClearCoat, then matte medium.
After I peeled off the tape strips, I had to find a collection of metaphors about time. During my internet research, my little dog, Opie, slept on my knee.
I used pencil to write the quotations, scribbled my journal title on the side of the page, and stenciled images of clocks from a Crafter's Workshop stencil.
In my collection of old books, I found an entry by J.C.C. Smart, "The River of Time," that spoke to my pondering on the meaning of "water under the bridge." I scanned it and colored in Photoshop to go with the warm colors in the background. I think this entry is finished, but I might go back to adhere some 3d clock elements.
