Beauty is Relative

What is beauty? If you are selling beauty, that is especially an important question. It varies from day to day, year to year, culture to culture. On one of my daily dog walks, I picked up a brochure from a small local beauty salon that uses only organic products. The top right image is from that brochure, and it got me thinking about why the model has super pale skin and lips and very dark eyebrows. The flowers in the hair made sense, but the pale, elongated face didn't, at least to me.

I started this unplanned journal page with a strip of painted paper that had the two black Dina Wakley face stamps, and using a glue stick, adhered it to the bottom of the page. At the top of the page, I used a tea bag that had been stamped with white paint. The center strip is one of my fabric designs, but printed on paper. I added a few small torn strips of antique music, a snipped with a book page number and some Chinese newsprint.

The central figure, the organic model, reminded me of a geisha, so I used an Artistcellar stencil at the top with a purple VersaMagic chalk ink to play up the Japanese undertone. The purple dots were added with marker, and  the words about beauty were added with a fine line black gel pen.

Unplanned Stamping

Usually my work table is covered with bright color splashes. Today, for unknown reasons, I was in a sepiaish, black and white, earth tones mood. I started puttering around yesterday, using assorted favorite stamps with white printmaking paint, and printing a bunch of teabags for future use.

Some of the smaller teabags were printed using a Julie Fei-Fan Balzer geometric stamp. Once dry, I adhered them to ATC blanks with a gluestick. My favorite whimsical girl stamp called to me today, and I used her on top of the printed teabags. I added some tiny words that I had previously output from a laser printer onto clear Avery mailing labels. I made a total of seven ATCs, each a little different. The one above will be traded in the October Paper Traders Winner Take All, where group members submit any type of ATC...the group leader pulls a name randomly and that person wins all the cards for the month.

I used up the leftover white paint from my ATC-making by painting broad, uneven strokes onto a black page in my journal. Once dry, I used an assortment of Julie's stamps with the little girl, which became today's journal page. The photo is a little blurry, but I liked the way it came out. It was totally unplanned. I really was just cleaning my brush on the black page. One thought led to another, and I started grabbing stamps and printing, and the page just emerged. Sometimes art is planned, sketched, thought out, and measured. Sometimes, as with this page, it just flows out unplanned.