DLP 2015, Week 10 -- Make Your Mark

The Documented Life Project
March Theme
Making Your Mark (Doodles & Mark Making)
March 7
Art Challenge:  As A Layer Element
Journal Prompt:  Surviving the Elements

It seems to me that everything I put on paper is a mark, so I just went out of my way to include as many mark making techniques as I could think of.

First mark, paint. Fluid acrylics, to be exact, plopped on the paper and then quickly spread out with a baby wipe. (Learned that technique from Dyan Reaveley, and I love it. What a time saver!)

Next, some drips and splatters of watered down paint, followed by scribbling (more on that in a sec).

For the scribbling, I mixed equal parts of black fluid acrylic paint and airbrush medium, and used this handy little tool.

At this point I got too into the adding of marks and stopped taking photos at each step. Some of the things I used: Portfolio oil pastels, stencils with ink and with paint and also with embossing paste, rubber stamps, bubble wrap, pencils, markers, mica powders.....like I said, just about everything. And that was just on the background.

I also dug out my never ending supply of gelli print scraps, went to the sewing machine, and sewed some wonky flower and leaf shapes. These I cut out, in addition to some minus the stitches. And this crazy garden was born.

The journal prompt is "surviving the elements," and all I could think of is how cold and snowy this winter was, and how looking forward to seeing a flower instead of a snowdrift I am. 

Here are some closer looks. And if they aren't close enough, just click on them. Hopefully, enlarging them won't result in a blurry mess, which has been known to happen.

This was fun for me, because it's not really typical of what I normally do, and the colors are certainly brighter than my usual choices. Which means I operated at least a bit out of my comfort zone, and that's the whole point of these challenges, isn't it?