“A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, God said, let there be lips. And there were, and they were good.”[1]
A Warm Welcome
I spent most of the morning going through a stack of magazines, pulling images for gluebooks. Most of the magazines were of the Women’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal and O[2] variety, so my stack of cut-outs is full of lips and doe eyes and all manner of ridiculous girly stuff. One disturbing trend I noticed was that many ads featured women’s faces, but only from the lips down.
Big, luscious, red lips, I might add. The rest of the face is apparently of so little importance that it can be omitted.
An American
Speaking of magazines, I also scanned a few more entries from my Dada Journal. Connection willing, I’ll upload them. Most of them are just my whinging about pointless things, but there’s one (still textless) example of how to work with large, dark areas. Erasers are your friends, folks! Depending on the quality of the clay coating on the paper, it may take more or less effort to lighten/remove the dark ink. I’ve made the journal out of pages from Real Simple magazine, which has fairly good quality paper, but the clay coat sticks like nobody’s business. It was a bit of a pain in the arse to erase, but well worth the effort. Erasing would also work relatively well to lighten page text, so that it can be overwritten more legibly. Just be careful not to be get overzealous, or the paper will tear. Don’t ask how I found this out.
Erasing is also a good way to scuff up the surface of a slick page so that it will better accept ink. If you’re having trouble with ink beading up, give erasing a try. Or, try sanding lightly with super fine steel wool. Beware, though, that the sanded paper will suck up more ink, so you may end up with heavy, dark lines.
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[1] If you never went to see a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when you were in high school or college, you missed out on a boat-load of fun.
[2] Oprah makes me bitter. She has a huge cult following, with women the world over hanging on her every proclamation. That’s an enormous amount of power. Sometimes she uses it for good, but often, she abuses it. For example, her magazine, O. While it pays lip service to empowering women, it undermines that message by proffering advice to manipulate men (who, apparently, do not have the brains the deity promised geese), in various and sundry ways. In particular, this advice encompassed shutting your mouth around your man, not talking to him during a ball game, not disagreeing with him, etc.
Perhaps the most mind-boggling of the advice in that particular column involved advising that, if if a woman compliments a man, the man will think she wants to sleep with him. And, that the same is true no matter what the woman says to a man. A simple “Good morning” is an invitation to hop in the sack. WTF?!
The irony is that, by following the Oprah Plan, women are actually being manipulated by men into taking all the responsibility for the success of the relationship. It’s a world in which men have to do none of the work. How on earth anyone could possibly think that’s appropriate or healthy is beyond me.
red paper boat 