Dlp2015 week of 6/13

Can't even remember the prompt, something about routing your travels, and too lazy to look it up. Pic of my dad's mom on a bench and me in a lake. She was a wonderful grandma, the only one I remember much of. We visited at Easter and I was fascinated by all the lizards in their covered parking area.

Postcard sketching

Still slogging away on DLP2015 but a few weeks behind now. Ah well. Sometimes the prompts just don't grab me. But I have these old postcards sent to my mom's mother and decided to draw one of them. I clearly don't posses the sketching gene but it will serve the purpose of reminding me of the real postcard from 1912.

dlp2015 week 15 acrylics

Ok, finally back to a medium I'm comfortable with. Started with a painty piece of under-paper, did my usual collage, paint, doodle thing and wound up with a page I like. What a surprise. Found some nonsense words I liked and stitched them on, then glued the whole thing to my journal page.

In case it isn't obvious, or maybe I forgot to explain, I'm doing dlp2015 on individual sheets of heavy watercolor paper 9"w x 6"t. Tore 9x12 sheets in half. Left edge has two holes to fit into a little binder thing I have. Will put them all in when done and have a dlp2015 book. wa-la

The watery triangles are a stamp I made, using watered down black
acrylic to stamp with. Love the softness as opposed to the hard
edges of a stamp done with an ink stamp pad.

dlp2015 13 & 14

Still catching up posting my dlp2015 pages so here's a couple more.

The prompt was to make a custom element. I have boxes of family
photos that I'm determined to use up before I croak, so I tore my mom
out of a set of studio shots she had done when she was 20 or so,
around 1944, cut some strips of gelli print in my fave colors,
found some pearl cotton and made an element. The background is
black gesso, which is so wonderfully, emphatically *BLACK*.

The technique was watercolors. I did quite a bit of stamping with
ink that turned out not to be waterproof. Oops. But then I kinda
got into it and encouraged the drips with more watercolor paint.
This one is dark and weird and isn't on my top ten list.

dlp2015 weeks 11 & 12

I see that March 13 was my last post. I do so much on Instagram now - which also loads to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr (which I don't even know how to log into anymore but still collecting followers lol), and Flickr - that coming over here to write about it feels like a bit of an afterthought. But I'm not ready to quit blogging yet, so I'll do some catching up.

I'm still on track with doing the pages each week, just behind in blogging about them. I love that DLP2015 is completely free and has a lot of fun vids. While they are not step by step tutorials, it's always neat to watch someone else use the same supplies you have sitting around, and I often come away with something new to try or a reminder of a technique I'd forgotten about. So, thanks! Roben Marie and Art to the 5th ladies!!

There are sorts of interpretations of "borders" but, as usual,
I chose the most literal and made borders around my page.
I think I had visions of quilt-type borders, but alas,
I ended up with this, my least fave page so far. gack

On to "focus". I wanted a main element on the page that would
be the focal point. Doodling doesn't come naturally to me
but I worked at it and wound up with this. Like the colors
and I guess I like the page well enough. 

dlp2015 week 10

Ten weeks in and I'm still on track. Since it's about the only art I'm doing, I guess I shouldn't be real surprised.

This week is about making marks. My favorite 'mark' is a circle, so I cut a ton of circles (ended up using 97) from a wide assortment of gelli prints, then layered them all over the page. Added some black paint circles with a toilet paper tube and a bottle lid, then small white gel pen dots in 3's here and there and called it done.

dlp2015 week 9

Ok, after last week's debacle, I paid attn and pulled off week 9 without a hitch. I followed right on Roben-Marie's heels on this one, doing pretty much each step she did but in my own style. Whatever the hell that it.

1. Background - Glued down a piece of painty under paper, the lightweight brown paper I cover my work table with.

2. Paper Stack - Made a stack of painted and gellied papers of all sorts. This was my favorite part of the exercise, picking thru my paper box, tearing them into the right sized pieces, stacking and restacking until I liked the arrangement. Made a large one, a small one, and 3 circles. I'll be doing more of these. Sewed it right onto my page so that when I turned it over to journal, I had stitching all over the place and had to write around it. Doh.

3. Painty - Rubbed some heavy bodied white paint here and there to sort of blend in some of the paper edges and scruff up the border. Then some marks with the Stabilo All pencil, maybe my fave art tool next to my gelli plate. Wet the marks with a brush so they dribbled all over. #ilovegrunge

4. Stamping - Stamped black circles here and there with various things - empty tape centers (double rings at bottom left), empty adding machine paper centers (small circles on yellow at upper left), and a cardboard tube of unknown origin.

5. Gel Pens - Lots of mark making with black and white gel pens.

um... 5B. - A few words of text from an old book.

dlp2015 weeks 6, 7 & 8

Oy. When the week 7 prompt came along, cover up the good parts, or something like that, I made a background and sat it aside to dry. When I came back to my desk, I mistakenly picked up week 6 and covered it all up with dress pattern tissue and used tea bags.

Then I saw my real week 7 sitting where I had placed it to dry. Whoops.

So, ok... I just covered up week 6 which I really liked. But that was the whole idea, right? Sorta.

Anyway, I did a bit more stuff on the real week 7, adding more black than I normally would, then ran out of steam cause I was bummed about messing up. But I do like the look of all the tissue and tea bags on week 6.

Week 8 was about repeating and I used squares instead of my default circles, just for something different. The black ovals are a stencil I cut from an old file folder. Spelled out SQUARES across the page and did a bunch of black and white doodling.

Altogether a weird dlp2015 week. Will try to pay more attn for the week 9 prompt which comes out tomorrow.

dlp2015 week 6

Doesn't seem like 6 weeks since I started DLP but it is. Time is a funny (funny odd, not funny haha) thing.
Here's the challenge for this week.

February Theme:  Layers You Will Love!
Art Challenge:  When Not To Stop
Journal Prompt:  "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough!" 

Layers are good, I like layers, I just tend to stop too soon, so I was determined to put a LOT of layers on this page. I didn't bother keeping track, just kept adding things as they came to mind. Paint, collage, pencil, marker, gel pen, stencil, stamp, gesso, paint on credit card edge, paint on pencil eraser, paint on finger, dots, squiggles, Xs, vines, flowers, triangles, circles, scallops.

A common question is how do you know when a page is done? I did reach a point on this one where I looked at it and felt it had reached its apex and anything more would be too much. So I stopped, and I'm happy with it. Quite happy, actually. Love the colors. Michaels had acrylics on sale so I bought 6 tubes of my faves and used four of them on this page, along with black and white. No words this time, just didn't feel like it needed any.

Double click to see it BIG.

#dlp2015 week 5

The theme this week was to use your under paper (the kraft paper / newsprint / whatever you keep under your projects to protect your work surface as you create) on your page somehow. Under papers often have ink over spray, brayer roll offs, stamp proofs, pen tests, haiku drafts, etc on them - whatever the artist needs to use them for, so they're a just-about-free art supply that's completely unique, no two ever the same.

I dug out one of mine and cut a couple strips, folded them over and stitched around the edges. Then folded them one inside the other and stitched them to my page so that they made staggered flaps that lift up. Added the word "under" to the flaps, drew a vine, cut leaves and circles from more under paper, did a bunch more doodling and called it done.

The background is book text with a watercolor wash, then less watery drops blown around with a straw. Bit of shading in the corners with gel sticks. I quite like the look of this one. Kept adding tendrils to the vine until it looked full enough to me. I tend to stop too soon on things like that so they always look sparse to me later, but I like this one.

#dlp2015 weeks 3 & 4

Still January so we're still making backgrounds with book text and working on coping with the blank page.

There's a book page background that you pretty much can't see beneath
the gesso layer. Color is all Neocolor II crayons blended with water. I had a plan
when I started but it went by the wayside at some point and I ended up with this.
<sigh> Wasn't much inspired by the quote. Tried to perk things up a bit with the
black and white doodles but not real thrilled with it.

Strips of book text with distress stains rubbed all over, then gesso,
then watery black acrylic paint brushed along the edges. Dribbled
watercolors down the page for some more color. The "words with friends"
theme instantly made me think of all the words I've exchanged with
friends on the backs of the mail art we've sent back and forth. So I chose
a handful of my fave cards, printed them out real small and glued them on.
Black pen scribbled frames, and some writing. The "#mailart" is actually
a weird blue metallic gel pen but it scanned a very odd color. I like this page
a lot, the overall colors appeal to me.

#dlp2015 #documentedlife #documentedlifeproject

Those are three main Instagram hashtags in case you'd like to go see a bunch more Documented Life Project work by other artists. The DLP is a free year long project headed up by Roben Marie Smith and a few other ladies of Art to the 5th.
Last year I worked in the suggested planner but didn't like having a dated spot for each day. Made me feel like I HAD to write something every day, which isn't going to happen. Same thing with letters vs postcards. A letter seems endless to me cause there's always another sheet of paper; but a post card has a finite amount of space so I can see the end in sight.
Anyway, this year the official workbook is a large mixed media journal but I knew I didn't want to work that big and I know I like to work on individual sheets of paper so that I can run them thru the sewing machine, and not worry about paint going down in the seams and getting on other pages. So I dug around the studio and found a landscape format ACCO binder about the right size and tore up enough Bristol board to have 60 pages. As you can see in the pics, they'll all be hole punched on the short left side and stacked onto the metal pins of the ACCO binder. Mine is kinda like this in shape, but smaller and older with metal pins instead of the plastic ones shown here. And brown cause I haven't decorated the cover yet. I like it cause it's easy to add and remove pages.
The first two weeks are done and so far I'm keeping up lol. We'll see how it goes. I'm notoriously bad about sticking with year-long stuff. But I think this format and the lack of pressure to fill in the day blanks will help a lot. I am journaling a bit on the back of each one, mostly observations about the backyard birds, or dog walks, or how the stars looked at 6am when I threw out the day's birdseed.

Both pages started out with book text collaged on, then some color
from a variety of mediums, then white paint washed here and there.
The top one is simple - a few collaged circles and some doodling.
The bottom one has gelli print circles, color from Neocolor II crayons
(that I *had* to have and don't use near enough), some of the truly
ridiculous amount of washi tape I've stockpiled like it'll be the world's
currency after the zombie apocalypse, some of my hand carved stamps
stamped with Distress Stain instead of stamp pad inks, and a bit of
doodling. The smeary black is Stabilo All pencil, which I love and
need to stock up on. Having only one makes me nervous.