Scribble, scribble, scribble

Firstly, before I do anything else I must say that this project was totally inspired by Emma at A little Bit of Everything.  She describes making collages with crayon, ink and paper.  Wax crayons used to be one of my favourite media when I was teaching as I could plan at least half a dozen art lessons in which the main media was the good old wax crayon, including wax resist, paper/crayon batik, mirror pictures and transfers and before 'elth and safety made planning such a chore, melting wax. So reading Emma's post got the old juices flowing.

 The first thing was to gather material, paper wax crayons, oil pastels and water soluble neocolour sticks and to cover my paper with areas of colour as outlined by Emma, in linear, curved and blocks. I found an old gold crayon and used some Treasure gold as well.  Then keeping within my limited palette  washed over the top with Brusho inks. Of course the soluble crayons ran into the ink creating some lovely blends. I dried it off and then worked into it a couple of times more.  Now my brain was really on overdrive and as I read Emma's post I was reminded of the paper quilting I had experimented with so I switched inspirations!  Firstly I chopped up the sheet and reassembled it using wide zig-zag stitch, mixing up the pattern. I then bonded it to  piece of felt and added lots of stitching and even couched on some ribbon and gold mesh.

This pink and yellow one is constructed from two sheets of paper (my scan has made the gold areas  look blue), so I have two similar pieces to this. By the way I have tried this with cartridge paper and copy paper so far and the copy paper gives better results as it becomes much more flexible whereas the cartridge paper is inclined to tear and crack. So what to do with my pieces? I decided to turn them into boxes. Here are the first two I made...

I call them my Scribble Boxes

 This is a bit wayward, but are rigid enough to stand up and act as a pencil pot.

It is cartridge paper, lined with felt.

 This one is much softer, I should have stiffened it, but it still works well

 It is standard copy paper and again is lined with felt.

Finally I have also created four little 5"x7" canvases of my Summer's Ghosts photographs

I am hoping to put all of these in my Etsy shop soon. I want to make a couple more boxes first. What do you think?

I have had a very busy week including a visit to Art Van Go in Knebworth which I can drive to in less than half an hour.  It is a wonderful source of materials (mail order too) as well as a venue for workshops and gallery space. When I went there was a very colourful exhibition of Ruth Isset's work Awash with Colour. As Emma had also mentioned Ruth's work and one of her books (which is out of print), everything was rather serendipidous.

I have also joined the Artist Network Bedfordshire and my friend Sally and I are planning to take part in the open studio month in June so I need to gather together some showable and saleable work - and six months can go SO fast! More info on that nearer the time.

It has taken me hours to get this post together when I could have been stitching, but sometimes other things are important too.

I do hope you are enjoying a creative weekend and have a great week, see you soon.

Jill

(PS this could do with a bit of editing - please excuse typos and bad grammar - no time ,to time)