I can’t believe how long it has been since I’ve posted anything! I have been so caught up with work and family life that I have barely had time to squeeze in any free time for anything else. I have managed to complete a few pages but haven’t had time to document them so here I am… Catching up again!  I really must try to get into a the habit of blogging more often as I find it a fun and cathartic process.

Anyway, since I last posted I have discovered the free ‘Documented Life Project’ (over at www.art5academy.com). I am quite far behind with this project so have started with a prompt that appealed to me and will pick up the others as I can. I don’t want to put pressure on myself to catch up quickly or in order as that takes the fun and impulsiveness away from creating. I have to withhold my natural impulsiveness in my work life so art allows me to set it free!

The page I’m going to go through is taken from the March 7 prompt. Each month they have a theme, the March theme was ‘doodles and mark making’. Then each week within the month has both an art challenge and journal prompt, the challenge for this week was ‘as a layer element’ and the journal prompt was ‘survive the elements’. I’d had a challenging week at work where I had begun to doubt my skills and knowledge and I had been questioned about my thought processes. It made me doubt myself hugely even though I knew I had been doing the right thing. Anyway this page is the result of me processing my thoughts about this and releasing the steam!

I love layers and paper so my first port of call was collage.  I collaged down some circles I cut out of kids craft tissue, LOTS of circles, in fact one from each layer of the pack of tissue! I then put a watered down wash of gesso over the whole page to push them back a little and gently wiped some back with a baby wipe. On top of this I sprayed some dylusions purple ink through a doily and printed the remaining ink on the doily back onto the page. I suddenly remembered that the dylusions inks are not permanent and worried about the bleeding through upper layers so decided to layer the printed tissue over the top of where I sprayed ink. I knew from past use that under layers show through this tissue really well but didn’t want to smudge the doily image with glue  so I put gel medium onto the back of the tissue and then gently lay the tissue over the top of the sprayed sections. I the scraped a layer of gel medium over the top of the tissue to seal it down. On top of this I stuck down some strips of yellow tissue with gel medium.

In between this and the next picture I also added some strips of green tissue and torn strips of spotty washi tape. I cut some circles of gridded paper from a kids Maths exercise book I use for notes and stuck those down. At this stage I still had no idea where I was going with this page, I was just having fun! Next, I started adding paint. I used my distress paints to add some more colour, I loved the purple and yellow on the collage layers so tried to stick with those colours. I especially loved how the circles turned out. They remind me of the sun… And I needed lots of that in my life this week! I wiped back patches and blended with a baby wipe. The border around the edge was added with my inktense blocks and my finger dipped in water.

The next picture us where I started to get an idea of where I wanted to take this page. I decided to doodle around the circles with my black and white pens and then added journaling around the circles and border of the page.

This is a close up, you can just see the original tissue paper circles peeping through… I love these layers and colours!

The next photo really shows the page coming to life! I added some flowers doodled in black pen and then more colour picking up on the orange and purple with sharpies used to colour in the doodles and acrylic paint through a stencil. I outlined the doodled flowers with my white soufflé pen… One of my favourite pens!

This is a close up of the flowers. I love how the sharpies are almost translucent over the top of the gel medium. The colours are so warm and glow like stained glass!

I still need to add a quote I have chosen and will be back to post a picture when that is done!