DLP prompts and daily journaling

Welcome to September and the beginning of Spring here in New Zealand {happy dance}
I decided to change my way of daily journaling this spread. I've been feeling less like documenting my everyday happenings and just doing meaningful journal spreads, but I can't quite give the DLP prompts a miss so this time I decided to divide my spread into 4 and use a prompt for each section. 
Prompt : layer 2 favourite stencils
I had some deli paper that I had gelli printed in a session with 2 stencils - it was a lovely piece to start this section (left under the August heading) - of course then I had to add 2 more of my favourite stencils....and then I was starting to get into the next prompt...

Prompt : collage

This was such fun, and I left space to add some journaling, but released myself from making it formally daily by not adding proper dates - really like how this page turned out 

Prompt : document a happy thing
Double happy with the arrival of a new great niece (see the quilt detailed in my previous post) and the feeling of Spring fast approaching. Our Magnolia tree has been bursting from bud this week 

- lots of pink required to celebrate these two events. I began with a couple of favourite tapa stencils in different sizes 

Then decided I could use them to create a memory of the flowering magnolia

Also cool to be able to use a spring stamp - have you ever tried wetting a watersoluble crayon by dipping the tip in water and then rubbing it on a stamp?  It gives a lovely soft image

Prompt : self-portrait AND highlight your favourite number
I feel like every face I do becomes a self-portrait of sorts, and I am enjoying creating faces more and more...I don't have a favourite number, but feel like "lots" is good - especially when it comes to flowers. This was how she started

The completion of that section gets me to the end of August and the latest DLP prompts -

not sure what daily journaling looks like for me in September, but you can be sure I'll share it here :-) 

You can see my Flickr album with all my daily journaling spreads HERE. You can find out more about DLP 2016 the unPlanner HERE.

LB2016 : Layers of love

Lots been occupying my thoughts and it feels like more than a week since I shared with you. Finally completed my art journal page created from a Life Book 2016 lesson with Rae Missigman. If you click on her name it will take you to her blog - I always love her work. She's one of the team that began the Documented Life project, and she was also a teacher on 21 Secrets 2013 where I made this book cover project : 

Remembering this class was called "Layers of love", these are my page progress photos 

I thought this project would be easy for me because I love layering, but it came together very slowly. I've had a week of challenges and sadness which affected my art. The page got too dark, and even when I lightened it with the white I still wasn't inspired. I had faith that something would click eventually, so just walked away until that something happened 

Once I put that spray through the lace on a couple of edges (which came from working on another project), I was sorted. I knew I needed to add more light with a central focal so decided to check out my colour wheel for some inspiration. 

I was looking at the split complementary triad of Violet (of which I have lots!) and decided I wanted to add more yellow-green (currently a bit in the background) and "red" but decided I'd like more Pink brought up so not just in the background. I selected a couple of feature stencils, and grabbed my green before deciding that actually what would give more light to my page would be gold...and then while the stencil was still in place and the paint wet, I added sparkle with glitter as well. Loving it 

If you click on any photo you can see it larger with closer views of the layering. I was finding joy in my project at last :-)
When I did my last Life Book project called Wings & Light I enjoyed using a watercolour crayon with a blending stump to smudge the colour and I did that again here to add much of the pink - really pleased with how that worked.

Rae said at the end we should "add that one little flair that makes it your own". Because I created this page in my journal, I couldn't add stitch as I often do. She had added journaling to her page, and I decided that one of my "signatures" is using found text. She had talked a lot during the class about being kind to yourself, and about letting your art speak to you and for you...these words were right 

At last, here's the final reveal : 

Click on the photo to see it larger, or go HERE to see my Flickr album of all my Life Book 2016 projects. I worked on this page without reference to the page facing it - it was always covered with a piece of baking paper to protect it. So I was more than thrilled when I saw the finished pages together in one spread - like they were made to go together!

You can see all my posts about Life Book this year HERE.

Daily journaling

Even when I don't manage to keep up with actual daily journaling, I always manage to keep notes of my happenings. Today I got up to date and can share my next completed spread in my daily art journal. Started with a page that featured quite a lot of text in the background, so began with watersoluble crayons, blended with white gesso to give a pastel layer and subdue the background enough to write over. If I'd used clear gesso, that would have still sealed the crayons but made the layer brighter.

Quite a bit happened this past week. One of these was that I did Kelly Rae's "Wear your Joy" class through Brave Girl University. They have some awesome classes offered, and if you're home on holiday and have the time I recommend giving their offerings a look (interestingly, this is a cheaper way of getting this particular class than going through Kelly Rae's blog link).
If you've read anything about this project on Kelly Rae's blog, you won't be surprised that her approach is about positive self-talk and celebrating your body by dressing joyfully, rather than putting together perfect outfits. For a few months now, I've been taking photos of myself every day to inspire me on days when I can't think of what to wear. After doing this for a couple of months I noticed that I feel more comfortable about doing this, I'm enjoying finding different combinations of clothes to wear, it's easier to find things to wear in the morning, and I'm loving my body more even though I'm not "Model" sized. These photos are summer holiday fashion for me. After doing Kelly Rae's class, I'm now photographing myself to include my smile. 

The other thing Kelly Rae had in the class was encouragement to write our own Joy FULL manifesto - see her original here. I quite liked the idea, and decided to adapt it and capture some "truths" of my current thinking. I printed them on some pretty paper - the drawings in the background are therefore not mine, but the tapa stencil and words are :-)

Click on any photo if you want to see/read it larger.

It's fun to find things like this that inspire you and can be done in a small way (by which I mean not taking as much time as making a full canvas would) to add to a page of daily journaling.

I have been wishing that we had Ikea here so I could get a groovy art trolley - this week it suddenly dawned on me that I could probably buy an alternative here - and indeed I purchased a cheap trolley at The Warehouse for $25 that does the job of holding all my (from the top down) acrylic paints, metallic/iridescent paints and alcohol inks, sprays, watercolours and other inks. No idea why this thought never crossed my mind before!!

They are all together - portable on wheels - and I now have a couple of spare shelves in my studio that I need to have time to reorganise. I also went through a whole lot of old calendars that I'd been hanging on to, and cut out just month and day headings, and kept a few numberings. Hence I added January to my first page above (that is the Maori translation below) and the word Thursday to my second - I like to try & enter my day/date in different ways.

As you can see, this page also had a lot of text. If you click on the photo you will see that my journaling is a bit tricky to read in parts. Therefore I wanted a different look for the rest of the page and glued down some under paper (plain paper which lies under and alongside my projects to capture ink and paint as I work) - I like that the text still shows through a bit.

I want each of these spreads to have some kind of art featured - a prompt or an actual art lesson or idea as you saw above. I have been inspired by Documented Life to make more art cards. They are small pieces of art that I can collage, add found words, and stitch on. Excited to see how these progress. I had been gathering collage words for my next Life Book project, and decided that this went perfectly with my joy thoughts of the previous page...I started with a card previously gelli-printed - adding texture with stitch over a glittery fibre ribbon, and some gold paint on a handmade stamp

And we finished our week yesterday with a fun road trip up the mountain

We had brilliant sunshine - very little snow to be seen on our trip up the chair lift. 

And we did a couple of great walks

With stunning views

Beautiful New Zealand - this all only 2 1/2 hours away from my home. I know I keep saying it, but feel so lucky to live here.
So that was rather a long post about my Daily journaling spread for this past week. I like the detail for myself to remember how I did certain elements, but also to inspire you to either start daily journaling, or to see some different idea to add to yours. 
Have a great creative week - whatever that means in your life.

You can see my Flickr album with all my daily journaling spreads HERE.

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!