Life Book - week 2 project

The second week's lesson in the Life Book course was about creating an art doll symbolising our true intentions for the coming year.  The video for the lesson was fun and easy to follow and it encouraged us to use our stamps and combine them in different ways to create a doll.

I have never created anything like this before because quite frankly I have never had the time or seen the point! However, going through the process made me realise a few things - I have waaaaay more stamps than I had realised, I have some pretty cool stamps that I have NEVER used and I tend to use the same stamps over and over but in the same way!  Creating this art doll made me stop and think about what I want for the year and part of that is to just enjoy the process of being creative.  When craft is your work there is a real danger of the fun being sucked out of it and I really don't want that to happen.  I find it hard to find the time to craft for myself and something like this would usually be way outside of my comfort zone but thats exactly why I need to do it.  So I am celebrating the process of being arty and creative as my intention for the year.

I broke out my Dylusions sprays for the background in yellow and red but they were so intense they dominated everything and so I decided to add gesso over the top.  One of the cool attributes of these sprays is that they reactivate when wet so adding the gesso meant that they blended into it to become a much softer version of the initial colours.  I much preferred the soft background and the gesso gave a great 'tooth' for other mediums later on.  I stamped my images onto plain copy paper and cut out each one.  I then had loads of fun combining things, turning them upside down and coming up with something that I liked.  I glued them with Matte Medium and when they were dry I added colour with watercolour pencils and crayons.  I printed a couple of quotes out and added the cut-out words around the edges of the page - the theme of the quotes was 'change' which is my word of the year and it felt apt to add that here.  The final touches were made with fine pens to add little details that made the design my own and then I had to stop or I would have tinkered for ages as I was having so much fun!

If you just want to have some fun, play freely with your supplies or want a warm-up exercise to get your mojo going, I can highly recommend that you give creating an art doll a go!  It doesn't need to take very long and its so satisfying, no need to be Da Vinci or Damien Hirst!!