Calendar Challenge

My friend in the UK Kate Crane started up an Art Calendar Challenge (which I did not sign up for) and everytime I checked out her blog I was in awe of her beautiful calendar creations ... so yesterday I thought I'd have a play in my journal and see what happened and here's my calendar:

I had an existing A4 Visual Arts Diary in which I'd already created some pages from a workshop, so decided to keep using the same journal.  I started with a light blue patterned napkin, added a wash of yellow and added orange and red paint with a brayer.  I decided to go with bright colours for January as it's Summer and hot here in Australia.

The next layer was stamping with flourishes and patterns around the edges in brown.  I used Heidi Swapp mask alphabets for January and temporarily placed the 4cm x 4cm squares, which I cut out of ordinary white printer paper, then sprayed the whole thing with terracotta glimmer mists.  My plan had been to lift everything up and voila finished calendar ... but the glimmer mist colour wasn't dark enough to make out the letters and the squares didn't show up enough either, so I used the outside edge of the mask alphbets and inked inside with brown so the month could be read easier and permanently adhered the plain paper squares with a bit of ink around the edges.

I have to say, the calendar thing is kind of addictive and although I haven't "officially" joined the challenge and committed to creating a calendar each month, I really like the idea of recording a few words on my happenings every day ... I could be hooked!

"For last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice."

~T.S. Eliot ~