Harvinaisen Kaunis Elämä: Art Daily Cafe April 2022

Hello friends,

Silence… It has so much to say if we stop to listen to it, breathe it, feel it. I tried to capture the gentleness of silence into a journal page. Which wasn’t easy, by the way, as silence can easily turn into something cold, harsh, empty, if you let it.

First, I added vintage musical sheets onto the edges of the journal spread. (Bach – because if silence had a sound, it would be Bach’s.) Then I added bits of fabric tape (the one they used for ice hockey, that one) here and there, glued a sweet girlie print in place, and primed everything with a light layer of white Heavy Gesso. Next, I used Paper Texture Paste and Irish Tapestry stencil for gentle dimension that would frame the pages.

I stamped some lace and flower images in black to get contrast, and with Liquid Acrylics Ink Black and Burnt Sienna, painted the page edges. I also painted over the stamped images to get them look more free hand looking, and after the paint had dried, doodled with white pen on top of them, so they look more like sketches than stamped images.

I added some bits of my own poems to create the feeling I wanted for this silence to have and added gentle light in form of Gold Metallic Flakes (and Gilding Glue). With Dragon’s Eye Spark paint, I added some splashes of light all over the pages.