page 7 Advice from a Mermaid

While on a road trip with my mother last year, we stopped into a gas station restroom.  They had the most beautiful white linen like paper towels in their dispenser that I put one in my purse to paint on later.  It was like painting on canvas!  I covered the book pages with the whole sheet of paper towel and then painted on it like I had stretched canvas on the surface.  It really made a nice creamy surface.  I also attached a pocket I found in a library book that was being thrown away.  I love how librarians over time have dialed the date on those little date stamps and meticulously recorded every time a student borrowed a book from the library.  The pocket dates go back to October 1966 (a little over a year after I was born) and the card goes back to February 1984!  (about four months before I graduated from high school!!!)  So many hands have touched those two pieces of paper!

I use the tags to hold mermaid stamps that happen to "swim" my way.

Advice from a Mermaid

Get Your Tail to the Beach
Be Shore of Yourself
Don't get Tide Down
Make Waves
Catch a Sea Breeze
Avoid Pier Pressure
Always Sea Life's Beauty
Come Out of Your Shell
Take Time to Coast
Keep the Beaches Clean...
Its my home sweet home!

I think that is pretty sound advice!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alphabet soup!

Image
I have always LOVED "ransom note" letters.  Those are the letters cut out of magazines used to write a ransom note.  Of course, I've never had to use them for that purpose! lol.  I like to glance thru magazines and see how expressive the lettering for adds are.  The artist who puts that add together has made some very distinct decisions on font, color, size of each letter to convey not just what the word will say but how that word is supposed to make you feel about the product they are selling.  I purchased enough large matchboxes to create a chest of drawers to keep these cut out letters ready for my journal pages.  I use them for everything!  Tags for gifts, labels for jars, writing poems for my altered book journals.   For this page, I thought about the cookie monster on sesame street and how he loved to eat cookies.  Well, this monster loves his ABC's so much he thinks they are food.  Not the way "food for thought" should be i...
Read more

It's OK to put it all in there!

Image
I constantly come across great images.  illustrations in old books that the librarian discards, glamor magazines, newspapers and even those local magazines that have adds will have clever images that are great for telling your story.  For this page, I had one of my "sink paintings".  I also had a giant pair of lips from a lipstick ad.  the librarian threw away books on different Victorian era writers that had some great illustrations of Death, cemeteries and ghost.  It was natural to just paint a Dia de los Muertos skull in the middle of it all.  I have a plastic drawer system that I keep images in as I find them.  Most of the time, I will go ahead and fussy cut them so that I can assemble the page beautifully. There is no way to just sit down and create a page by looking in magazines when you want something.  you have to think ahead and collect images and items that speak to you.  Then, the page pretty much creates itself from what you have....
Read more

She guarded it as if her life depended on it.

Image
This started out as an Inktober prompt.  GUARDED.  I loved the drawing so much that I decided to create a whole page.  I have been making a lot of washi tapes and was able to use about five different ones in this piece.  It took me about two weeks to gather all that I wanted to use in this.  The Egg is so valuable that its being held up by gemstones.  (I got the gemstones out of the Hemisphere magazine on my two plane flights in and out of California this last week end!!)  The back ground is made with a gelli plate. I also repurposed a velum Christmas envelope that I just received in a swap this week.  I really like this piece!
Read more