When I was in Japan, I bought a tube of gold paint that I think might be watercolour, but I'm not really sure. But the liquid bottle of gold lusciousness used here is definitely acrylic, and likely a gift from my friend Page, who uses bottled acrylics; being a snob, I've only ever purchased acrylics in tubes.

Anyway, it squirted out with, um, vigour, so I had more than I really intended, and glopped it over a tea bag paper: in fact, I think I used the paint itself to adhere the teabag paper to the substrate (copier paper—I have a stack of the stuff, with varying amounts of printing; being cheap, I pull the pages with relatively little, cover it up with other paper, and go along my merry, penny-pinching way.

paper, stickers, transparent, washi and metallicized tape, paint, gold leaf, metallic markers, ink; roughly 5.5 x 8.5"; worked on and around 05apr2026; photographed 08apr2026 with sony A7c, sony 90mm macro lens; f/2.8, ev +0.3, 1/100s, ISO 250, WB: cloudy; rotated, cropped & scaled in gimp, otherwise out of the box, for a change...

The metallic gold “washi” tape was from my trip in 2025; the transparent tape printed with gold vintage (& the gold leaf stencils it's holding in place) are from this year's trip. The metallic purple pen is...mebbe from the 2024 trip? —I'll be so glad when I finally get the ’25 & ’24 journals bound, then I can release all the leftovers into the wilds^[1] so to speak:)

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.