LB2015 : It's the little things

The first Life Book lesson of the month is usually created by Tam, our host for this awesome year-long project. She has blogged about this lesson and you can see detail photos HERE. Let's see how mine went. Tam created hers on 2 adjoining pages, but I decided to just go really large with a page double my normal size.

Liking the start of my face, and used black and white collage pieces since this lesson is partly about using black and white for contrast.

I ignored what she said to write with though (it was supposed to be a watercolour pencil and markers - I thought the pencil wouldn't stay) and wrote the things I want to remember from the here and now in purple permanent sharpie marker....this became a huge problem to me :-( 
I went on to add layers of colour - the marker just kept showing through and I don't like the effect

We were supposed to add things that are reflective of us now, and I love stencils, so next I grabbed these

Click  on any photo to see it larger.

As well as the stencils I had also applied white gesso to the areas of words that were still really bugging me, and then swiped over some of my favourite iridescent green paint 

During the week, I listened to this interview with Jane Davenport. Listen from 46 minutes if you don't have time for the rest - she said that all art goes through ugly stages, and you should NEVER stop working at that stage. Leave the room for a necessity break only - grab a drink - come back, and work until you can see where you're going again. At this point I quite like the stencils, and I've brought in that bit of black to balance the colour in the painting. Before I leave it for the day, I've decided that tomorrow when it's all completely dry, I'm going to try applying a layer right across of clear gesso. That should stop my pens bleeding up through layers and my white paint is also picking up ink from previous layers which is okay, but I want a whiter white in places.

Next day - below is my page with the gesso on and dry - can really see the words showing through in this shot....but not for long! I've never used clear gesso before so the markers turned out to be an opportunity! It provided a nice "tooth"/surface for my next layers and I think it would be great if you wanted to collage glossy papers and then put down a layer of this for paints that you want to add next. 

Now I need to layer and layer : another layer of that lovely peacock feather stencil, some more contrasting white and a couple more fern stencils to go over that word

Here's a close-up of how lovely those layers look 

I wanted her hair to have a bit more life, and white stars was the answer for that (used white sharpie paint pen for these)

My ferns weren't standing out enough and needed a lovely brighter glow

and I always enjoy adding extra touches of colour through drywall tape

I learn something new with every Life Book lesson. Click on my finished page to enjoy it larger

Turns out she wasn't really finished! See my next post to see her complete.
You can see all my posts about Life Book HERE and I've created a Flickr album for all my Life Book projects HERE. 
You can still join Life Book HERE and all the previous lessons are available immediately.