I have found a terrible side effect to doing multi media art. At one time I would have viewed items such as packing material as possibly being useful for keeping should I wish to send something fragile somewhere, or if combustible keeping it to use when starting a fire. I may have kept a tag from a shirt that had a ribbon as a potential row marker for knitting in the round. Other things would have gone straight into the recycling bin or the rubbish bin.
This week I took delivery of some Fair trade Easter Eggs and was delighted when I saw the packaging. It has squares indented on it. Wow – how amazing that will be in a multi media art project! Some new shirts had a string holding the tag, which I thought could be useful, along with the tissue paper. And some new cotton handkerchiefs (I’m and old lady and prefer them to tissues) had pieces of paper that would at one time gone in the recycling but I thought they might be useful. i also keep any odd bits of ribbon.
Today I spend some time playing with paint and some acrylic gel/medium that my daughter bought me several years ago. I hadn’t used it because I didn’t know what to do with it. I have discovered it works very well as a glue when doing multi media art. Sadly one of the pots has gone solid and now I can’t get the lid off. I feel guilty that I didn’t use it sooner. Just goes to show that you shouldn’t save things for some far off day when you will be good enough etc.
The pages on the paper you see on the bottom left here are from an old English Hymnal. I doubt I will ever use it again as a hymn book so I may as well use the pages in art. I read an article about journaling with a tutorial which showed how to prepare pages. I was inspired and actually thought about using pages from an old bible but couldn’t bring myself to do so.
The page on the bottom right is the result of me playing with the gel and some acrylic paint plus some pieces of paper. The strips of squares are the edges of paper off a ring bound pad. The top left is a piece of paper from a sketch pad that I pressed onto my paint palette to absorb the paint left on it. I will keep it to use in a future art project. “Waste not, want not” is a phrase I grew up with.
I’ve had a good day off today. No finished pieces of art, but done a bit in preparation for future use. I also did some ironing while watching The Calendar Girls. I’d forgotten how much of a tear-jerked it is.
Elizabeth Jones' Diary 