As I made this spread the United Kingdom
was still in lockdown and I was once again struck by how appropriate Ben Okri’s
words proved to be for the occasion. In fact I keep on re-reading them and
taking comfort from them over this difficult time. We have reached the point in
the poem where a bit of meditation is called for. For my illustrations of the
previous lines you can search for my name in the Search bar of this blog and
you should find them all. There will be more to come too in the future.
Here are the steps I took to make these
pages:
1. Gesso
2 facing pages out of the large ArtbyMarlene art journal. This is a ring bound
journal so it’s easy to remove the pages from the journal and work on them
separately. Very convenient!
2. Paint
a variety of yellow, green and blue acrylic paints onto a large gel plate and
take prints from the plate onto both pages.
4. On
the right hand page add the tree using stencil Windswept Tree Mask and brayering on brown and blue paint onto the gel plate,
then put the stencil on top and hold it down while removing the paint all
around it by taking prints on spare paper and removing the remnants with a baby
wipe. Make sure all surrounding paint is gone and then remove the stencil. Take
the tree print on the page. To make this
easier there is now a mirror image stencil available Windswept Tree Reverse Stencil but I
didn’t have it yet at the time of making so had to go about it the long way
round!
5. Stencil
the Buddha face onto the left hand page
with dark blue acrylic paint and stencil Chinese Garden Buddha Small.
6. Stencil
on leaves to the bottom of both pages, using the dark blue acrylic paint again
together with stencil Leafy Doodle Border.
7. Glue
on the magazine image of a Buddha under the tree using matte medium.
8. Stencil
on the lotus flower using stencil Chinese Garden Lotus to the left hand page.
9. Glue
on eyes (mine came from an image of Tutankhamun) and colour in the lotus flower
from step 8 (I used Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers).
10. Outline
the Buddha figure and head with a permanent white marker and outline the tree
with a sparkling blue gel pen.
11. Print
out the lines of the quote: “The Buddha
sat beneath a tree, and from all illusion became free”, and glue on as
shown, after edging each word with a blue ink pad.
13. Edge
the pages with the same ink pad.
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