I"M THE GUEST ARTIST! Daily Journaling Week 33

On the blog for Life Documented 2017 HERE : this week it's me!!! 
Theme: Art appreciation Month : Embrace yourself - Embrace your Art

Technique: Using pretty paper serviettes/napkins as a collage layer

Prompt: Be inspired by one of your favourite artists
Quote: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As always, I have highlighted the prompts in green as I use them.
I ♥ Klimt - he is one of my favourite artists. I love his patterning, his figures, his use of gold, his compositions, his lovely elements of swirls....I could go on! Starting from there and wanting to share one of my favourite journaling techniques with you, I began by gathering some pretty paper serviettes

First I painted the background of my spread gold so that there'll be a glow to the page as I layer up, and then I chose the serviettes that would be added as a collage layer. 
First separate the back layers off your serviette so you are left with the top layer only - there are most often 3 layers to a paper serviette (the middle layer of this one may also be usable since it has a faint print of the top layer)

To get exactly the pieces you want from the serviette, use a small wet paintbrush to outline the element, and then tear around that water line

Spread your gel medium/glue onto the page just covering the area of the element you want to add, lay the serviette on top, and then use the remaining glue on your brush to smooth out from the centre to the edges. The torn edges blend beautifully into your background

Do this with different serviettes to lay your base collage elements.

Then layer up - I gathered some of my favourite small stencils

and lovely Iridescent paint - you can add iridescent medium to ordinary paints for that lovely shine

Now time for more serviettes as the main act - torn with the wet paintbrush technique. 

Time to play with some layouts and then to glue down what I love 

I added the figures and butterfly and then highlighted with a white Gelly Roll Sakura pen cos it's all feeling a bit dark

When I feel like it's a bit of a hot mess, I know it's not done and I need to add more!!

A good tip to see what you might do to fix a page is to photograph the page and look at it in black and white

This shows up my problem areas and here's what I did next - my "go to" favourite feature stencil with white paint sponged through

Also added another paper serviette butterfly and some black line drawing to highlight the squares a la Klimt....plus more white outlining/doodles to highlight

I always knew that I would be adding found words and I had a wonderful find for $3 at a recent Red Cross Book Sale of a large print dictionary which gave me Embrace : 

and I often use words from Large Print romances as well

Now I can call my spread done

I so hope that by seeing my full process you are inspired to do a page using serviettes and to keep moving forward until it's done. Leave a comment so I can come see your version. Embrace the process - Embrace your creativity ♥
For further inspiration see my first post HERE about decorating the cover for my Daily Journal which used the same techniques. 

You can see all my posts about this Daily Journaling project HERE and my Flickr album of all my pages together HERE.