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.

Beauty's Only Skin Deep

 

For years I have made art paper dolls, so after I made an collaged journal background, I decided to see how my doll parts would work in collage. I chose a few interesting, unrelated leftover body parts (mostly printouts of royalty-free vintage graphics from The Graphics Fairy) and, using a glue-stick, stuck them to the page without over thinking it. I ended up with two unrelated pages side by side. the background has charred baking parchment, printed tea bags, painted deli paper and other assorted papers.

 

The left side has a face that I just didn't know what to do with. It started with a small square stamp of a face, but the face had a black border around it which made it awkward to use. I enlarged it added color, a neck and hair and turned it into something that looked like Chrissie Hynde on a really bad day. It sat in my doll part box for years looking kind of sad.

The pear is a not very subtle reference to the pear shaped body type, and the little face at the bottom of the pear is a salute to pregnancy and motherhood. I liked being able to have the boot unattached to the body--it suggests a young woman who is rushing and barely has time to get dressed, maybe juggling motherhood and family and a career.

The right side is a face from a New York Times Magazine fashion spread and body parts from a vintage paper doll. I didn't intend to do a two page journal spread, but I had so much fun with the left side I decided to keep going and do two doll pages.

As I looked at it and decided what to do next, words came into my head: "beauty's only skin deep." Using mini alphabet stamps and a permanent black ink pad, I wrote out those words on the left, and on the right, the "model" joins in to the musical refrain of the Temptations hit song with "yeah yeah yeah."