DLP Week 17: Playing With Inks...

The week 17 Documented Life Project challenge was to use inks. I have a good collection of acrylic inks, spray inks, Tsukineko inks, Posh Rainbow Inks by Ranger, Inktense pencils (love these!!!), India inks...you get the idea...so this week's challenge was just about pulling out the media and playing. 

Yoshi and Wafer were most interested as I added the final doodles while enjoying the beautiful evening out on the deck.


Here are a few close ups, followed by the full page spread.  

Happy Mother's Day! 

DLP Week 2 Is Finished...

The art challenge for week two of DLP was to use gesso and the journal prompt was the quote "The beginning is always today" by Mary Shelley.

As is so often the case, I got busy having fun and forgot that I wanted to capture pictures of the process for those of you who requested seeing them.  This first image has several layers of found papers, pretty napkins (serviettes...or whatever you call them), and paint, applied with my fingers.

I then used a fun spiral stencil and dabbed on white gesso with a make-up sponge.





More paint was added to soften the contrast and then I added some subtle finger painted circles.

 Using a couple of different sizes of paint brushes I added more circles. I also traced along some of those wonderful spiral shapes with a black marker and added black dots to create a bit of a swirly border for the page.

More circles...

Haha...more circles in the form of bubble wrap...

And finally, some big bold text.  I chose to use a different quote with a similar theme.

I added some more white, using my favourite white pen (Signo) to highlight the text and I'm calling it done.

It's pretty busy, but I love all the layers.

Writing With Ink

This was a fun page.  I started by playing around with inks, as per Joanne's lesson 21, and one thing led to another. I had these 'Posh Rainbow Inks' by Ranger in my stash and they've got a very fine tip so you can write with them by just very gently squeezing the bottle as you go.



After using the butterscotch to write the words, I echoed them using cranberry.  I drew the flowers in the same way.  I ended up cutting them out because they just needed an interesting layered background to allow them to pop.

I started by using a lace doily and spraying with green Dylusions ink. I then layered on some blue and purple acrylic paint, using an old gift card and my fingers.  I stamped over that layer with Traci Bautista's 'creativity flows' grafitti stamp.  It was a fabulous surprise to see that some of the green Dylusions spray somehow bled through so that the stamped letters had a green caste in some places.  That's one of my favourite things about those sprays...you never know what added bonus you'll get that you could never hope to achieve on purpose!

I followed that stamping with some found object stamping to create some circles here and there and then I glued the original words and flowers I had made in place.  The final step was to do a bit of journalling and doodling using my white Signo.

Finger Painting and Some Inky Text

When I was first watching Joanne's lesson 18 video, I was laughing...yup Joanne, I was one of the ones you were threatening to send to the principal's office. LOL However, seeing as I seldom keep my fingers out of the paint when I do play with acrylics, I thought why not do lettering with my fingers.  And it was fun.  I like the thick rich texture I could achieve.

In another couple of lessons, we were exploring different mark making tools.  I used the little Gum dental soft picks as my 'pen' for the page on the left.  I just dipped it into the India ink as needed while I wrote.  It like the control I had with it so that I could write fairly easily while still getting a looser looking text that with a regular pen.

The page on the right was done using the dropper in the India ink bottle.  That was a bit harder to write with, but again it gives an interesting, loose text.

Judging by the watercolour background of the second page, I think I'm finally beginning to get a better feel for leaving some white space as I paint.  I'll need to keep working on that...