Recycled Mini-Album Pages–The Road to the Isles

WOYWW visitors – please scroll down for this week’s post.

After thinking I’d finished the Scottish pages, I thought I’d add one more, devoted to the Scottish song, “The Road to the Isles.” This was my dad’s favourite Scottish song, and mine too – it is so evocative of the pull that the Western Isles has on those with Scotland in their blood, and those who have chosen to be adopted by that wonderful country.

Many years ago when I was a child, and we used to have musical evenings in our home, a couple who were old family friends used to be regular visitors. The wife was a brilliant accompanist, and her husband had a fine baritone voice. While they used to perform classical music, they were also very fond of popular songs, and they regularly performed the song “The Road to the Isles,” which we always used to request because he sang it with such gusto!

In the course of my search for the full lyrics of the song, I came across a Youtube video of Kenneth McKellar singing it. He was a wonderful singer and sings this with great flair. The music is full of “Scotch snaps” and based on the pentatonic scale which is so common in Scottish music. I love the dialect words, and the evocative names of the locations in the Western Isles that so drew the writer of the song.

Anyway, to my page. I created a very subtle (too subtle probably!) background on which to write the lyrics of the song. Here are the materials I used.

I swiped across the pages with the distress stains (Salty Ocean, Evergreen Bough and Dried Marigold) to suggest a tartan design. On top of this, I added some perfect pearls with a soft brush – Forever Violet, Green Patina and Cappuccino. Once dried, it was very dark, but it catches the light, and it doesn’t dominate the text, which was written with the white marker pen.

You can see a bit of the colour on the left-hand page. I added another border, and a few more thistles around the text. Here are a couple of detail shots. The colour shows up much better in real life.

“May the best ye’ve ever seen

Be the worst ye’ll ever see

May a moose ne’er leave yer girnal

We’ a tear drap in his e’e

May ye aye keep hale an’ herty

Till ye’re auld eneugh tae dee

May ye aye be jist as happy

As we wish ye aye tae be.”

…and lang may your lum reek (long may your chimney smoke)!

Altered Pizza Box

Edited – now with video.

A mixed media project. I am giving away one of my flower painted Ikea mirrors as a house-warming present, and recently discovered that it fits exactly inside a 10-inch pizza box. I thought the box needed a bit of decoration to make it a slightly more acceptable wrapping, and I ended up making a full mixed media project out of it!

I got a bit carried away and forgot to take any photos during the making, but I did video the whole process.

I started by covering the whole of the outside of the box with gesso, and then had a rummage in my Tim Holtz papers – they’ve all got a bit muddled up and I’m not sure which stack they come from – either Crowded Attic or Lost and Found, but it doesn’t really matter – they’re all nice and vintage. I found some nice faces and tore them out and distressed the edges with my distressing tool, and stuck them down onto the box with PVA adhesive.

I also stuck down some ripped up corrugated cardboard with some of the surface paper torn away, which gives a gorgeous texture. Once the PVA was dry, I painted these pieces with gesso, and then began painting the whole surface with acrylics.

I chose a blue and green palette, and did some dry brushing with white acrylic, and once I’d got the effect I wanted, I added some iridescent gel medium which gives a gorgeous shimmery surface, and then some pearlised acrylic ink, concentrating on the textured corrugated parts. The whole thing was extremely shimmery by this time.

I created some text, “Home is where the heart is” by cutting out some words and letters from scrap printed paper in my stash, and stuck these down onto a further piece of scrap paper with regular matt gel medium, which I also used to stick the pieces down onto the surface. Before this I coloured them with Victorian Velvet Distress Ink.

Once they were laid down, I took an old credit card and added some crimson acrylic paint with the edge of the card dipped in the paint, creating frames around the words and around the face pictures. I then added some more lines using my white marker pen.

To form a border, I used more of the crimson acrylic paint, and also some dark blue, and once the border design was laid down, I went round the edges and embellished the border with the white marker pen, and finally added some shadows with a mixture of Payne’s Grey and white acrylic paint.

The final touch was to add some Treasure Gold gilding wax to the raised texture. A really shiny, shimmery effect!

Once the outside was dry, I painted the whole of the inside roughly with gesso. This will be fine once there is tissue paper inside the box, wrapping the mirror.

Here is the finished box, propped up with the edges of the lid showing. I painted these with a mixture of green acrylics.

The box closed:

The sides of the lid go inside the box, and I painted the sides of the base with rich blue acrylic paint.

Now for some details. This is the bottom left corner. You can see one of the pictures I laid down, and also some of the corrugated cardboard. I love the effect of the top surface layer of paper being partially ripped away.

One of the face pictures. They are pretty subtle with the iridescent gel medium, and they also reflect the light so it’s a bit difficult to see them in the photos.

Finally a detailed shot of the text.

I think you can see how shiny and shimmery the surface is in this photo.

A fun project to do, and I completed it in an afternoon. One day I would like to paint and embellish the rest of my pizza boxes, which are used to store various materials in my ARTHaven.

Random Jottings

Quirky and intriguing thoughts that cross my path...

"There’s speculation, there’s speculation squared, and there’s cosmology." (Heard quoted on the TV drama "Numbers." Origin unknown.)

...a propos of which, (on the subject of dark matter supposedly being to blame for a decrease in the earth's orbit around the sun): "Speculation Squared: So, a poorly characterized phenomenon is explained, imperfectly, as the effect of a poorly defined and ill-tested hypothetical explanation for another poorly characterized phenomenon. Isn't it dark so far up in there? " (Technology Review blog comment.)

"Music is in the air - you simply take as much as you require." — Edward Elgar

Cats leave paw prints on your heart. (Blog comment signature.)

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays. — Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (trans. Fitzgerald)

I wish I was a glow worm,
A glow worm's never glum.
'Cos how can you be grumpy
When the sun shines out your bum.

If the Bible is true and there was a worldwide flood, we would expect to find evidence of its occurrence. As Ken Ham (President, Answers in Genesis USA http://www.answersingenesis.org/) says, we should find "millions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth." And surprisingly, we find "millions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth." (Creation Science Evangelism, http://www.drdino.com/read-article.php?id=143