Yarn Bombing , the Ents and Lots of Gesso

Week 5 of The Documented Life Project 2015 - The Journal. 

See here for more information. Art to the 5th Academy

January Theme
The Blank Page and How to Face It!
January 31
Art Challenge:  Under Paper (paper on your work table that gets all inky while you work)
Journal Prompt:  What Lies Beneath?

A sweater (yarn bombed) tree, layers and layers to cover mistakes, a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, and just plain fun.

I combined several things with Week 5 of the Documented Life Project challenge.
Pictured is one of my yarn bombed tree on our property.
I have been meaning to create some art of my trees, and now I had the perfect chance! I am taking Junelle Jacobson's online class called Saturday Mornings 2: Love and Whimsy. The first project was to decorate wooden blocks with these adorable sweater trees. For now, I'll be content with this page in my art journal instead of on a block. 

So....

Layering...

I forgot to take pictures of my process of the VERY BEGINNING. Above photo already has quite a few layers going on.  

You can still a bit of the chevron gelli-print peeking through. ^^

 I started adding some stamped images and blobs of acrylic ink to the under paper, but it looked awful, So, I covered it up with gesso,  running a pencil through the wet gesso in loops at the top left. Then I added splatters of Tulip fabric spray paint, and yellow Prima Bloom ink spray. The gelli-print was printed on white cardstock, and so you can still see the lines of the page. I like that. :) 

The yellow Prima Bloom spray and then blotted with a paper towel, create the texture above. Used partially dried out gesso for the edges of the under paper, so it created some fun lumps. Teehee! ^^ 

Embedded the paper towel for a bit in the wet gesso as seen above. ^^ Added some of that yellow spray here too with some pink Dylusions, making orange. 

 By my calendar, I had doodled with a black Sharpie, but it looked awful too, so I covered most of it with gesso. 

 The circular pattern you can still see through the gesso here was made using one of my hand-carved stamps, in which I had added Neocolors 2 to the middles. Didn't like the effect at all. The pink piece of paper to the right is a piece of cardstock which I deliberated on including on the page. At this point I did not know yet what I was going to create on the page!

Played around with various things by placing things here and there, to see if an idea would come. I went back to it over and over to stare at it for about a week before the idea hit! A tree with a sweater!

On to my tree sweater! 

At the same time as attempting this DLP challenge, I am also trying to keep up with Julie at Balzer Designs #28patterns on Instagram. So I keep a keen eye on anything with a pattern. 

So, with the combination of my mind on patterns, Junelle Jacobson's sweater tree class, the DLP challenge of What Lies Beneath? and making a mess playing with various art supplies, my eyes fell on the patterns of the paper towel...

Lightbulb!

This square-ish pattern would look so cute watercoloured, and cut into squares, mimicking the crochet motifs on my yarn-bombed tree!

I colored in the square using a few different coloured crayons from my Neocolors2 stash, and then wet the towel with a brush. Next, I cut out each square to approximately the same size.

Next came the cutting out of the tree and covering it up with book paper using matte medium.

 I applied a thin layer of Raw Umber acrylic paint to the tree, allowing the book text to still show through.

Next I glued the squares on to the lower half of the tree in a diamond shape configuration. 

Next, some scrapbook paper strips to upper branches.

Next, leaves! This was the hard part. For the background portion (the unfocused leaves) on the tree, I stamped directly to the page. At first they looked like flowers, as I used my new hand-carved flower stamp, For the more "in focus" leaves, I just cut off the petals, making them (kinda) look like leaves. Tried a different stamp too, but the leaves were too large.

Here's a photo of my most recent hand-carved stamps. For the leaves, I used the smallest flower, cutting apart the petals to resemble leaves.

I wrapped the motifs around the tree, and taped them to the back. I figured it would add some dimension to the tree if it was thicker.

Added veins with a Sharpie, and added paint to the leaves. Now they looked more like leaves instead of flower petals.

Loving the luscious painty splats there...^^

Added white modeling paste dots by smoothing it over a stencil on the trunk of the tree. (First I did green dots, didn't like it, so haphazardly put white over the green.)

Added some dots of white paint with a Tim Holtz dot stencil for the negative space.

Added some yellow dots for flowers with Liquitex heavy body paint.

Added quote by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Added some shadowing with a black Stabilo All.

My quote above. ^^

Underneath the warm sweater, is a tree. And it has history, just like the Ents in Lord of the Rings have. ;) 

Some green grass with various watercolours.

And I'm finished!

Hope you enjoyed!

Thank you for stopping by, and have a super day!