Found Poetry

Yesterday I put the finishing touches to two spreads for a round robin in my Artwords group. The topic of the RR is "Found Poetry".

This one is for Gena in France. As you can see, I've added a Claudine Hellmuth style doll. The face reminds me of the queen in Alice in Wonderland. The words are from my stash of interesting newspaper titles and subtitles. I mounted them for emphasis and so it would be easier to get them to stick to the background.

I made the background in layers. For the first layer I dry-brushed on light sienna, dark sienna, and touches of red and yellow acrylics. In the second step I spread white gesso and used a tooth comb to move it around. Some of the first layer was completely visible, some of it was faintly visible through the ridges, and some was entirely obscured. I dry-brushed the ridges of the gesso layer using pale gold and copper acrylics. Layer four was a gel medium transfer of pages from an old German lexicon in fraktura script. The print dried too pale and the writing was barely visible, so I painted it over with a layer of latex binder. Latex binder can be used as a medium to eek out paint and seal collage spreads. It's easily (and cheaply) available in Europe, whereas many of the wonderful products artists use in the US are not. That did the trick and make the print visible. The figure and words make up the final layer.

This one is for Gisele in the Channel Islands.

The background to this page is watercolour pastel that I spread using a baby wipe. The baby wipes make for rich jewel-colours. I then painted the background over with a wash of sparkle paint. Then I stamped and embossed and stuck on a few blue skeleton leaves before adding tape transfers of words and phrases from my newspaper stash.

The top of the page features a pop-up that will be familiar to everyone in my 1000-Mini-Journals project. The pop-up is embellished using scraps from a sheet and parts of colour copies of cabinet cards and postcards, pepped up by a few painted brads and a couple of beads.