Moona

Working on the Art Journal Journey June challenge (maps) has been postponed do many times I was afraid I wouldn't get it done! Especially since I knew what I wanted to do and it kind of scared me. I luckily dared to start playing and was happy to get inspiration from the Viva Las VegaStamps challenge using their prompts (black, white, green, dots, circles, sketchy, script, doodles...) and stamps too, of course. The sister of our dog, Moona, was run over by a car in the beginning of June... we had spent a lot of time together and really thought our dogs could visit and enjoy each others company for years to come. So here's for Moona, we all miss her. Sniff.

I started by tearing a piece of a map of our home town. I was happy to find it possible to get our home and Moona's home on the same spread. Actually even the dogs' birthplace is there, but I didn't think of that while gessoing. I used both white and clear gesso with the aim to have the homes and the route between them showing through a bit more than the rest.

I have never done an image transfer before. I looked through a bunch of tutorials on different blogs and found that it works different for ink jet prints and toner photocopies and laser prints... I had printed a large picture at work with a machine that also works as a photocopy machine. I'm sure it isn't an ink jet, but I have no idea what technique options there are for the functions of colour printing. I decided to just do it: opted for gel medium, and tried a small piece first, you can see the green in the lower right corner above. At least something transfered, so I spread gel medium over the picture and burnished well... and then waited and peeked and waited again and after maybe five minutes I lifted the paper. The edges were ok, but the middle had quite a lot of paper left on it. You can see that about half the page stuck to the image, half came off. I continued by rubbing the surface while it still was wet, but found soon that I had colour coming off too.

I left the image to dry and continued some hours later, misting with water and gently rubbing the paper away. It rolled nicely, but at times the colour came off too, especially around the eyes... I coloured the white from next to the eyes with black and brown markers (didn't want her looking like a zombie), otherwise the worn and torn look is fine. If I should do something different, I would spread the gel medium further around the image (I tried to get just the dog), it would have been easy to cover the extra green with gesso, now I lost a part of her other ear. Fixing the eye (or eyebrow) really made a difference, she looks like herself!

I started doodling text on the left page. I used acrylic paint markers, micron pens and a charcoal pen. I forgot to take a picture, but I felt it was empty and decided to stamp. Guess how disturbing the result was?!? Horribly restless and not nice at all. I hated it... a mess, the stamped images bled on the gesso and the text just dissapeared. Besides I had to sleep overnight for the ink to dry before I could start covering the stamped images with gesso. Luckily the end result is very pleasing, I used white gesso, Fresco Finish Granny Smith and Dina Wakley Umber, blending a bit with a baby wipe.

I thought this was finished at this point... untill someone noticed I had the year wrong, we are running 2016! Luckily this was easily fixed, and I ended up using a few more stamps too. This time I used Stazon, and it gave nice crisp images :) While I was at it, I spread a layer of satin glaze over the transferred picture. Part of the leftover paper on top of the image went transparent (like tissuepaper does), so it became a bit more vivid in colour.

I used a short poem-like text that I once copied from a funeral announcement. It's from Eeva Kilpi, a Finnish poet and though it doesn't translate very well wor for word, the idea is approximately

don't say that life is short

say: what a special experience

since it is not at all a question of length

but of experiencing the here and now 

Dogs are known to live in the moment, they don't worry about the past or daydream about the future. Yes, our dog does miss her sister when we do something where Moona would generally have come along (like going to swim the other day), but otherwise she doesn't really think about it, I'm sure. The mourning part is left for us humans, and I guess we'll gradually get even with it. I didn't have to shed tears making this page now, if I had tried a couple of weeks ago, I probably would have. And I'm super happy with the result, this spread will be cherished :)