What I did this week-end

DLP - Week 44

So here we are at week 44 of the Documented Life Project, and I am still participating and uploading my efforts into the Gallery on the website, where they often pale into insignificance against other participants efforts (http://www.art5academy.com/gallery). There are some very creative people participating in this project.

We have just done five, yes five, weeks of translucent papers for the month of October.  I had to improvise in a couple of challenges as I was not sure of what was meant by deli paper and I had no glassine. Luckily the last challenge was "Tea bags, Dryer sheets, Fibrous papers" and I have plenty of tea bags - having saved some unused, very out of date tea bags to use for dyeing at some stage.

So I steeped one tea bag in hot water, emptied several others and added them to the pot to colour up - which they did nicely. Once dried, I carefully pulled them apart so they were ready to apply to my page.

Here is the page I started with:

It was made using up leftover Paynes Grey and just dabbing the make-up sponge onto the page. I also added some alphabet stamps to use excess ink, from the same project (see Dream BIG below).

To this page, I glued  my tea bags and selected three Distress stains which I sprayed on the page. Again, AS USUAL,  the red is too strong for my tastes but I  stayed with it because that was my original choice.

Here is the page after spraying over the tea bags:

As you can see the first spray with mustard in the bottom R/H corner is very tentative, but they get stronger with the red and stronger again with the peacock.

From here, I covered the page lightly with gesso, found some paint to match the stains and used the make-up sponge again to stamp square shapes on the page. I wrote this week's DLP prompt "Just Create", added some stencil elements, and called it done.

Not my best effort, but it has several layers and the colours look much, much brighter in real life.

Dream BIG

The other page I completed this week is in the journal where I use up any leftover paint or mediums. It had some brightly coloured geometric stencils on the page which I covered up with two different paper napkins, I put a pink wash over the napkins and outlined the edges in green. I added a fern-like stencil using olive green distress stain, but it didn't show up very well - BUT when I turned the stencil over to press the excess stain onto the facing page, I got a great effect.

So I redid the stencil in Paynes Grey (hence the start of my page above), and added a rubber stamp of the Paris skyline to go with the top napkin. A couple of tissue paper butterflies, some pen work around the edge, and letter stamps to say "Dream BIG" finish off this page.







































As you can see, the reverse of the stencil looks great and I will use this page in a journal  in the future. All together a very successful weekend for me. I am happy with what I produced.

It is hard sometimes to get inspiration or even motivation to keep creating. That was one of my goals this year, and I am very pleased that I am still going with the DLP and still creating something each week ... and sometimes more that one something each week!

It is very satisfying to have achieved at least one of my goals this year.