Drowning in Dickens Triptych

Back in May at Art and Soul I met a gal named Jennifer. We were in a Leighanna Light class. She and I and another gal shared our workspace. Jennifer and I got to talking and decided to exchange email addresses and work out an ATC trade. We settled on doing a triptych with the theme of “drowning”. I was stumped when Jennifer asked about what theme we were going to do. I sent her a list I had downloaded but forgot how vague the themes were. I pondered this for a while and decided to see if there was an online thesaurus. Turns out there is http://www.eat.rl.ac.uk/. I entered the word drowning in the stimulus box and it spit out 34 different answers. One of them was Dickens which had me puzzled. I’ve been listening to classic literature when I take my neighborhood walks but as of yet haven’t listened to any Dickens so I had no idea where the connection came in. I wasn’t sure if they meant the author or not but after a bit of googling about Charles Dickens I found he used the reference to drowning a lot in his books. http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/. Now I finally had some direction in where to go.

I downloaded a map of Dickens’ London and cut it to fit and copied some of the quotes that reference drowning in Dickens’ books and used three different type faces that are indicative of his era. I printed them on vellum so you could still see some of the map. I already had an image of Dickens from a collage image book and carefully cut it out from the book. I used grungeboard as the surface and glued down the map, quotes and the image then used some Ranger Distress Inks to age the edges and the outside.

I used grungeboard hinges but used glossy accents to glue them. I added brads but they are for decoration only. The last step was the outside decoration so I listed some of his books by the years they were published and then added the title “Drowning in Dickens”.

Until my next post,
Diane