Week 28 : DLP 2015

Information about the FREE weekly Documented Life Project is HERE. 

Because this month's theme is ephemera, I thought I'd start by gluing down some large dictionary pages for my background. Wanting them to remain as a visible layer on these pages - and just for fun, picked one page featuring the word "layer" and one featuring "focus"

I knew my focal point this week would be a face - just felt like I needed to get back to that practice. Recently Tam had an amazing special on her Fabulous Faces class. I have loved her lessons in Life Book and thought this would also be a good one to have in my repertoire. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to work through it all yet! But this week, I decided to watch the beginning of her first lesson to get me started. I painted the page with white gesso first in the area I thought the face would be so the pencil lines would appear clearly :

In that online class, the first portrait lesson is just with pencil and learning about shading, but I wanted to add colour. I decided to have a flick through Jane Davenport's book since she uses wonderful colour in her art portraits. One of her techniques suggested blending water-soluble markers with a milky wash created by gesso and matte medium. I just used the supplies I have :

Here is the "before" shot of colour added to hair with watersoluble crayons

and here's the "after" shot of the face with colour in progress

Haven't tried using just the gel medium to blend and make watersoluble mediums permanent yet, but went on to use this technique for my background layer right across the spread and enjoying the pastel look this week. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Was starting to think about the "time keeps on ticking" prompt : the daffodils are a paper serviette and I added a stamp of a clock - was thinking about how we are getting through July and that brings us closer to Spring. The other part of the art challenge is layering and I did this in a few ways. You can see the face has developed with layers of colour. My next step was to gather more ephemera

and create a layered tag look, attaching elements with stitch

Layering also happened on the background with additions of acrylic colour through stencils, and that cool tape with the months on it fitted well with the time prompt.

I changed the word at the top of the dictionary page to read "Layer" (instead of Law) and layered the tag on top of the background

Then I added writing around my face focal - it reads : "There will always be 'have to' in your day...make sure there is always time to do something that makes you feel JOY and be grateful for today. Time passes quickly and you don't know when your time will be up"

I'm really happy with how the completed spread looks, and I feel like I did well with including the different aspects of the challenge and prompt this week.

Click on the photo to enjoy it larger or see it in the Flickr album I've created for all my Documented Life 2015 spreads HERE. You can see all my posts about this project HERE. Again this is last week's challenge...I had to make quilting progress. Am going to try and complete this week's challenge within this week!