The Documented Life Project Week Two

 The Documented Life Project challenge for this week is Gesso. I threw down a bit of yellow, orange, and green acrylics and several dollops of gesso and used a brayer to cover the pages. Then I used my Faded Text Background from Stampabilities with some black ink.  Added some gesso stencil leaves and more stamping in black. Made some flowers, described below and used gel medium to attach them, the quote, and tags. Used my finger to stamp green circles and added details with a white gel pen. Finishing touch was to ink the edges. The prompt this week was: “The beginning is always today.” -Mary Shelley

 Sandi Keene left a link on how to make her deli paper flowers. It is free and I highly recommend watching it if you like these fun flowers on my page.I used a gelli plate to color some book pages and deli wrap that were then used to make the flowers.

The tag, you may recognize, was made a few days ago. Just click back to the last post to see details on the tag. The white strips were leftovers (waste not) from punching out some squares for the Inchie challenge that I contribute to every Monday. (You can check out my Copics and Paper Fun tab on the top bar to see some of them too.)

Thanks for stopping by and I LOVE comments :)

Journal 52, Week 30, Positive Words and a Waste Not

Journal 52, week 30, Positive Words. It took me a bit more time to think of words that really meant something to me. I came up with two that kind of go together. Persevere and Patience. Now, if you know me, you realize what little patience I used to have. With hard work, I've gotten a bit better. As far as persevere, I am a close friend. Again, if you know me, you will know there has been a lot of opportunity for me to remember that word. I'm a firm believer that anytime life knocks you down, as long as you get up you've won. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time. And, with patience, "this too shall pass!"

I played with a lot of things on this one. I really wanted to use some of my Silks Acrylic Glaze. Don't you just love those bright background colors? I had several stencils and scraps (I throw cut out scraps into my spray paint box so they are handy.) that I used with some acrylic paint and some sprays. I used a bit of black chalkboard paint through drywall paint for the tiny black dots. This page makes me very happy.

Waste Not Cut-outs

Journal 52, Week 27 - Nostalgia, and a Waste Not

Journal 52, Week 27, Nostalgia. Well, of course I think of something to eat. I love any kind of food and when I think of any trip or adventure, the first thing I think of is what we had to eat! But this time, candy was on my mind. Back in the day, many streets had corner stores. The best part was the candy case. You really could buy two pieces of candy for a penny and my friend and I often shared our penny. Yum yum!

I used a cream cardstock and an Inkadinkado canning jar stamp with gray Memento ink. I filled using Copics for the colored candies and black acrylic with foam brush dabs for the licorice. I added a bit of gold gel pen on the lids. Then, Copics for the counter and shading.

For this week's Waste Not, I took my leftover punched flower and heart papers and used them as a stencil for two different journal pages. I sprayed with Dylusions.  They make a fun background for some future journaling.

Just Keep Swimming Journal 52

Journal 52, Week 26: Under the Sea. This was really a fun piece to work on. I had different techniques that I was just itching to try and decided that this was the one I would do that on. First, I grabbed a piece of tagboard that already had some gesso and splotches of blue acrylic paint on it. Then I took a piece of deli paper, wrinkled it up, sprayed it with Dylusions in blues and yellow and added it to the cardstock with Yes paste. When it was dry, I went over the top lightly with a white ink pad. The fish were cut out from some coffee filters that I had squiggled some white glue on and than dropped some inks, followed by Dylusions in yellow. I added a black ink dot eye with white gel pen highlight. The words were written with a clear embossing pen on to the deli paper. I used a white embossing powder, embossed and applied with a matte gel medium. On of my favorite yarn/spinning podcasters is Dr. Gemma, a psychologist who's mantra is "just keep swimming." I added the waves with some old gelli printed paper, bubbles with a pencil eraser and white stamp pad, hook from jewelry supplies, and a yarn worm with gold Stickles.

I love The Frugal Crafter and some of my ideas come from her. I often find ideas on the Internet and can't remember who to credit, but Lindsay showed the deli paper techniques. She has a lot of great video tutorials.

WASTE NOT
I had a wreck with my Glossy Accents. I was trying to unclog it when it decided to explode onto my work space. So, I quickly grabbed some flowers that I had punched out of leftovers and dunked them into the puddle. They dried nice and shiny. I used the same deli paper techniques for this piece as well.

Trompe l'oeil - Journal 52 Nature - Waste Not

Trompe l'oeil, fool the eye, was the prompt for Lesson 28 in Pam Carriker's Creating Art at the Speed of Life. This was a fun one. My hubby and I love to take trips on old fashioned steam engine trains and do you think I could find a suitable photo of my own to use? Of course not. But, good old Internet, I found what I was looking for. Same for the cat. I have tons of my own cats posing in all kinds of cute ways, but none looking the other way, so back to the Internet. This is my final. Both photos were printed in black and white, fussy cut, and then I had some fun with my Copics:


















Journal 52's prompt for this week was "Nature". Since I have been playing with watercolors this week as I work on classes for the Derwent Academy, I decided to do a watercolor of the miniature roses growing in my backyard.













And my "Waste Not" of the week. I found some Spellbinders dies on clearance at Michael's. They just wouldn't work for me. The paper just got stuck in the crevices and made an unusable mess. I was going to return them when I decided that I should look up the issue on the Internet. I found several places where the advice was to put waxed paper between the dies and the paper and it worked! So, I made some more passes with the dies and the waxed paper. When I finished with my pretty new cut-outs that could be used for cards or art journaling, I had the cut out waxed paper pieces too. The art journal page that I was playing with at the moment had some flowers already. I held down the waxed paper and pounced over it with Broken China Distress Paint, then flipped it over and pressed to make a reverse image, then glued down the original piece of waxed paper. (The flowers are from a stamp that I had made with craft foam and the center purple was just some paper that had overspray that I just couldn't bear to part with.)