Happy to be the Featured Artist for The Documented Life

Don't you just love The Documented Life project? The artists behind the project, Rae, Lorraine, Roben-Marie, and Sandi, are brilliant and inspiring. I'm honored to be the featured artist this week.

My art challenge is tissue paper, and my journal prompt is "the disappearing trick."

I love using tissue paper in my art. It's great to stamp on, paint on, write on. When you glue it onto your work with gel medium, the tissue "disappears" and whatever you've put on it remains.

For these pages, I took tissue paper and put it on a stack on my table. I used my Dina Wakley Media acrylics and I started painting on it with my fingers and making marks with objects. I let the paint soak through from one layer to another.

I took Dina Wakley Media black paint and applied it to one of my Scribbly Birds in Flight stamps. Then I stamped it repeatedly on the tissue. I let the paint soak through to the next piece here, too.

When the painted tissue papers were dry, I started to tear them up and use Dina Wakley Media gel medium to glue them onto a journal page. I glued them on loosely and let them overlap. A flow started to become evident across the page.

I took some glassine paper that I bought AGES ago and drew some women on it with the Stabilo All pencil. I also glued some of the painted tissue. Glassine is different than deli paper in that it is coated on both sides and it is much thicker. Deli paper is great substitute, though.

As I glued and painted on the glassine, it started to wrinkle. At first I thought about trashing it, but then I decided to embrace the imperfection of it. The wrinkles give an interesting textural quality to the drawings. I firmly believe that art journaling is not supposed to be perfect. It is supposed to be expressive and emotive!

I added some color and some journaling and glued the women to the top of my journal page. To view the page, you can look at it as whole, and you can fold up each woman and look at what is underneath. I like how different parts of the page disappear and/or reappear depending how you arrange the glassine pieces.

Thanks so much to the Art to the 5th artists for having me as a guest!