"Kunstwerk" / "Piece of Art"

Hah, hah! I almost managed to do three weeks without anything crafty.... almost!

As our car was - as usual-  packed nearly up to it's roof when leaving for our three-weeks holiday to do some hiking, swiming, kajaking and relaxing at the lovely Austrian Attersee, I did not take any crafting materials with me (there simply wasn't any space left and I couldn't have decided what to take with me anyway ...or what to leave behind*gg). I only packed some felt tip pens, crayons and a white paperstash for my son, some scissors, tiny ruler, glue and the usual writing equipment as ballpen and pencil.

Our three weeks are nearly up (on Sunday exactly), but today I couldn't wait any longer and just had to do something crafty! An ATC seemed to be the only option, regarding my equipment.... or maybe it would be just some drawing.

Luckily my sister left me one of these (horrible) gossip glossy magazines, where I found an article about Jorge Gonzales, the trainee of Germany's Next Top Models. As I consider him to be the most beautiful person in the whole show (there are models there too, I was told...), I decided to draw a small portrait after a photograph in the magazine, using my favourite black ballpen from Pilot. As I am quite easily horrified by white paper, when it comes to more than some sketching, I used a brown paper page torn out from a cheap travel diary I bought at the beginning of our holiday (not to write in, but to use the pages *lol).

So here is the improvised equipment:

Having finished the small portrait, I came to the point where I recognized, I did not know what background I could do... no stamps, no inks, no gesso or design papers.... phhhhh! Then I remembered the coffee filters I bought for the holiday apartment.

Please, have a closer look at my favourite Pilot ballpoint and the inredibly cool coffee filters! *lol

First I scribbled some of the article's text onto the unbleached coffee filter paper (again using the black ballpen), to get some texture. I traced the edges with a brown felt tip pen, but I wasn't quite content with the outcome, as it looked quite boring. *hmpf

Something was missing and the whole thing looked too "clean". Then I remembered the filter paper experiments from school, where you drew some lines or spots on the filter paper with black felt tip pens and soaked that with water. The capillarity of the paper would divide the various colour-particles by their weight. The lighter ones would spread the farthest and one could see that some "black" colours were a cheap mixture of blues, greens, reds and many more.... (I hope, I remember that physical stuff right!). And that meant that they were not archival.

So I soaked the edges of the ATC with a wet kitchen sponge and voila!
The whole thing (at last!) began to look something in the direction of "cool". Encouraged by that small but crucial success I cut out Jorge's face and glued it onto the scribbled and "physically inked" filter paper, which I had cut to ATC format in the meantime.

I tore some scraps from the article about Jorge to add some more texture for variation.
I wanted to collage them onto the background, but there was still something missing. The contrast of the magazine paper pieces and the background was not intense enough. So I decided to colour the spaces where I wanted to glue the text-scraps onto with black and brown felt tip pen colour, leaving irregularly outlined traces of the pens' tips to build a kind of grungy frame around the scraps. But again - after glueing the scraps to their positions - that looked too hard-lined and did not go together well with the background and the sketch as smoothly as I had hoped.

Then I worked up the courage to soak the whole thing again with water, as I knew, the ballpen drewn portrait would stay intact, while the felt tip pen areas would bleed out. At least I hoped, that would be what would happen....

And it did! I am so happy with the outcome (mainly because it is my first ATC without any stamps or inks used and still I managed to get a somehow grungy look).

Besides: a beautiful man IS a piece of art, isn't he? :)