After the last lot of ghastliness I decided it was time to do something to recover, so I have been perpetrating art.
Well, not really, more like craft. I thought I’d have a go at something undemanding but fun. Create and Craft shopping channel was offering Stampbord at a good price so I bought a bundle and got busy. Stampbord is a clay coated board that allows you to place colour or inked rubber stamps on it and then scratch back to the board because the coating is a couple of millimetres thick. The product is too thick sadly to be of use in miniature work but as art therapy I think it is perfect. My first few goes produced this:
The motorbike is stamped across four pieces of board stuck together. I coloured the surface first, then stamped then scratched back to give the white tyres and so forth. You can see the work better close up:
you can also see from the three bikes down the side how very different the effects can be with the same rubber stamp but different colours. Deeply satisfactory, no drawing skills needed and just incredibly therapeutic.
Since I did these last week I’ve been bashing on and now have a whole boxful of little boards with bits of art on them. The piece with the top hat on it is an inch square, so they are a great size for sticking on cards, which is what I intend to do with them.
Art is the antidote to the awfulness of life.
I am off again to my mother’s today, it’s all fairly dreadful; it’s her 90th birthday in a few days, will she be ill and difficult before it, as she has been before Christmas, Easter, and every other anticipated event? Do I dare take her out for lunch or will she kick off in the posh hotel restaurant? Will anyone send a card or has she alienated the whole of her family, as you might believe from the number of phone calls she no longer receives? Her sister-in-law phoned last week since which she has never stopped complaining about the phone call, I think this aunt is the last person brave enough to still make phone calls, everyone else rings me and says they will ring her ‘soon’.
However today goes, I am fairly certain when I get home that I will be knee deep in art as soon as I’ve had my tea.
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JaneLaverick.art, the place for inky fingers. The rubber stamps were variously: Anna Griffin, Hampton art for Graphic 45, Tim Holtz for Stampers Anonymous and Pollyanna Pickering for Create and Craft.