DLP Week 4: How a Page Can Take Over...

This week on Art to the 5th's Documented Life Project, the Art Challenge was 'Writing' and the journal Prompt was 'Words with Friends'. I always start my spread by setting up the journalling boxes along the right side of the spread so that I can 'document' my life for the week even as I work through the process of creating the art on the rest of the page. That way there is no pressure to hurry the art along and theoretically even if I don't finish it during the week I can always come back to it without falling behind on the actually recording of my dailies.

Because of the challenges, I pulled out washi tape that was postage related or 'writing like' and then put some actual postage stamps to use.

I have several stamps that contain various kinds of scripts so I were used to get me started filling the blank white pages.

Using two different blues and a purple pen-all I wrote 'letters' to friends, family and even myself in the spaces left by the stamps. I quickly began to overlap the script areas and stamped script in all different directions.

 I then adhered some bits of collected paper: part of an envelope in which a letter was sent to me by a friend, a little gift card envelope and a beautiful little tree. The diamond shapes were cut from a paper napkin (I take the layers apart and only use the top, printed layer).

A bit of black was added in the form of some bold black circles. These were inspired by some art I saw in a display window of a clothing store in a mall.

At this stage I started adding layers of paint, doodles and collaged elements and words. It's during this process that the page kind of took over and went from being all about letters to being more about books and words.

Because of one of my dailies, in which I wrote about the 'puppy pants'* I made using a pattern I found on this wonderful site called Mimi & Tara: Dog Clothes Patterns, I made a tag that includes a couple of pictures of Yoshi modelling her fancy pants. The tag is tucked into the little gift card envelope.
*(Lions Foundation of Canada Dog Guides breeds their own puppies, and since the females in Yoshi's litter are being considered for the breeding program, they are all being kept in tact until after they are brought back to the training school. As such, she may go into heat while she is still with me.) 

A Dog's Life...

Today's post is a look back at the life of a wonderfully special family pet, our beautiful Golden Retriever, Casey. Sadly, she left us a couple of weeks ago, but as I looked through all of my photos of her, I just had to share a few (okay, more than a few...but you can stop looking any time).

Casey was an adorable puppy who loved to play hard, get dirty, and thankfully swim (which cleaned her up nicely).

She was a wonderfully gentle, loving soul and great companion to all her friends, two legged and four legged!

Her favourite place was at our cottage, where she conveniently forgot how to drink from a bowl in favour of walking chest deep into the lake for her drinks, and a bit of a swim!  She loved boat rides and snoozing on the dock or the deck!

And she'd even car sit when my friend Heather came up to the cottage!

Our Pets...

It's been a pretty rough week around here for our pets.  Arbour, our 11 year old cat, has gone missing and we fear she may have fallen prey to a fisher.  We've learned since her disappearance that there are more fishers around this area than usual this year. 

Casey was two when we got Arbour and she's always been a bit of a mom to her cat.  As a kitten Arbour would just climb into that little nook in Casey's 'arms' and that's how they'd sleep. Needless to say, Casey has been missing her cat as have we.

To make things worse, Casey started limping on Wednesday and she spent last night in hospital, having had to have a minor surgery to have her damaged 'toe nail' removed.  The claw may grow back, but in the mean time the limp is almost completely gone and she's happy to be resting comfortably at home!  How do you like that cute bandage.  LOL

 Earlier in the summer, when my friend, Heather came to visit, she asked me to back her car down our large hill as she's not as comfortable with it as I am.  Casey, always by my side, followed me up the hill, so Heather told me to invite her in the car and give her a ride back down.  Well, Casey happily jumped in, and when at the bottom of the hill she just curled up on the seat and went to sleep.  She slept there for an hour before we were able to coax her out!  Silly old puppy...(she turned 13 in June, but will always be my puppy!)

Wise Words...

I love this quote from Winnie the Pooh, and when Kim's challenge this week was to use 'wise words' this immediately came to mind.  I've used some photos shot this week of Arbour and Casey, but I've also dipped into the archives to pull out shots of Spencer (we lost him to kidney disease a couple of years ago) and some of the oldies from when they were just young'uns.

As you can see, our dog, Casey, loves her cats.  When we first got Arbour she was so tiny I worried that Casey would accidentally crush her, but she was always so careful.  Arbour loved to snuggle in her 'arms' and that centre shot where Casey is looking at her like a loving mother is one of my favourites!  Now Arbour tends to sleep in my studio on whatever I'm trying to work on LOL, but she also loves to cuddle with the teddy bears on our antique settee.

Spencer was our 'puppy cat'.  He seemed to identify more with Casey than Arbour and although they all got along well, he preferred to be with Casey whenever he could.  I love the shot of them cuddling on our bed as well as the shot of the two of them on their respective steps.  As you can see in the bottom row, when he was sleeping alone, he had an odd way of lying with his butt raised up...too funny!

To quote my husband, "I'm going to have a little nap 'cause it's too early to start doing nothing..."

Hope you all find time to have a little snooze of your own today.  Siesta time is way underrated!

For those of you interested in the processing, I created the collage in Lightroom's Print module and then added the text and textures in Photoshop Elements. Here's a screen shot of what I did in Photoshop Elements:

Linking up with Our World Tuesday, Texture Tuesday, and Sweet Shot Tuesday.