Fat Page Jam #3 - part 1

I recently took part in a fat page jam with Pattie and Flippinpest. Here are the ones I made for Pattie! Flipp's will follow (when I know she's received them).




Pattie chose Poem as her theme and I chose my dad's favourite poem by John Masefield - Sea Fever. I painted the seascape in a mix of acrylic, oil pastel and brusho watercolour. On the back I created a sail to hold the poem.




Val chose Children's Entertainment. For this I went back to my childhood to a particularly weird - some say scary - programme from East Germany that was screened by the BBC in the 1960s.
It's called The Singing Ringing Tree. For years when I mentioned it to friends it drew blank looks. However, with the advent of the Internet I found there are loads of people who do remember it! It has since been hilariously spoofed by the Fast Show. There is a comprehensive Web page about it and a couple of clips on Youtube (it was released on DVD a few years ago).

The backgrounds and the fish were created by rubbing wax crayons and oil pastels over embossing mats and overpainting with brusho. In the case of the fish I ran it through my Big Shot to emboss it further.



A few weeks ago I watched a programme about Wabi Sabi, which is something of a slippery term. It's basically a Japanese aesthetic/worldview based on Zen which sees beauty in simplicity and/or imperfection and accepts the notion of transience. There's an interesting wikipedia entry which explains it better and more fully.

Front: for the background I brushed jade green acrylic and then turquiose brusho over a piece of shiny packaging. I then created the bowl from a circle of cardboard, using ink, brusho, acrylic and oil pastel to colour it - and clear glue to make a raise rim. That's the simple/imperfect beauty bit.

Back: Wax crayon resist using cuttlebug embossing folders, painted with brusho. The dried leaves represent change and the passing of time (and the inevitability of death).