Documented Life Project 2015 – Week 5

Today I'm sharing what I created for week five of
The Original Documented Life Project™ The Journal!

January’s Theme
The Blank Page and How to Face It!

January 31 Challenge & Prompt
Art Challenge: Under Paper
Journal Prompt: What Lies Beneath?

What is underpaper? I didn’t know what it was a week ago either!
But Lorraine Bell explained beautifully: “it’s the scrap paper you put UNDER your art as you work on it. It catches the splatters and over sprays, it’s what you wipe your fingers and your paintbrush on.”

My underpaper (shown above) is where I rolled off excess paint from my brayer and wiped off Carolyn Dube's Scribble Scratch Handwriting stencil while making gelli prints for note cards.

Inspired by Sandi Keene's process shared on her blog post, I used my round and oval Fiskars squeeze punches to punch out flower petal shapes. Easy. I used a glue stick to adhere the petals to my journal page. I really love knowing that the flowers of my garden lie beneath the cold, winter ground, so the flower image was important to me for this prompt.

I wanted a subtle watercolor background that allowed my colorful underpaper petals to remain the focus, so I grabbed a yellow-green Derwent Watercolor pencil. I dipped the pencil in clean water and painted in the background.

Then I dipped a paintbrush in clean water, brushing over the background to blend the color futher.

Lastly, I added wet Stabilo pencil outlines to my petals, keeping the tip of the pencil very wet to get rich, black lines.

Thank you so much, Sandi, and all the ladies of Art to the 5th Academy for the inspiration!
This was my first time using underpaper in my journal, and I loved it!

Thank you for visiting my blog!
I hope you have a wonderful week!