This month’s challenge from Michelle Ward at the GPP Steet Team is to work in a size out of your comfort zone.  She suggests we either work much larger or much smaller than we normally do, just to get out of the norm and challenge ourselves.  Since I normally work in a larger sized journal, I decided to make a tiny one.

I used a scrap of cowhide for the cover.  I made the pages from some pages I had torn out of a novel.  The larger book is the journal I’m currently working in, so you can see that it is much larger than the little one I made.

I have been wanting, for years, to add beads to the stitching on the spine of a book, so I took this opportunity to do that.  The coloring isn’t good in the photo but the stones are red coral and turquoise.

This is the first page in the journal.  I wrote like two sentences because it’s so small!!

This is one of the spreads.  I prepared the backgrounds similarly to the way I prepare backgrounds in my regular journal.  I glued papers down then used a credit card to pull dark brown and titan buff paint over the page.  I found it very hard to work so small.  The results weren’t bad, but I didn’t enjoy the small size.  It was indeed a challenge for me.  But I’m glad I took the challenge and did work outside my comfort zone.  I need to be shaken up from time to time.  Otherwise, I find myself using the same supplies, the same techniques over and over, and that is so boring!

This one was challenging for sure…at least for me.  You can read the challenge (which include a tutorial) here.  This month’s challenge was about monoprints.  I have to admit that I have long been challenged with this concept.  In one sense it’s simple.  You  put paint on something and then you lay it down on something else.  But every time I enter the monoprint world I suspect that these artists know something I don’t know, and they are trying to tell me but I just can’t receive it.  One thing I always wonder is this:  is rubber stamping monoprinting?  Anyway….I followed Michelle’s tutorial and did what she said.  I think I learned some techniques but I didn’t get the results she did.  I’m glad she said in her instructions that it takes practice.

Here are my attempts:

The first print was paint with an acetate shape laying over it.  So the print comes out with the shape in the center.  This was pretty cool.  I’m down with the lay it on, pull it up. 

But the second one was to pull up the acetate shape and put another piece of paper down.  Michelle’s came out with a really cool shape that looked different from the background.  Here’s mine…..

See?  I still didn’t have any paint in the center, and I don’t know why???

I always learn something from the challenges, and I like that I feel all disciplined by doing them.  But I don’t think monoprints is my gift :/

The challenge this month from Michelle Ward’s GPP Street Team Crusade 38 is to paint tissue paper with gesso and acrylic while you are doing the same on your journal pages, then apply the tissue paper layers.

I admit I did three spreads before I got one I liked.  The first two just didn’t look like my work.    I had not painted tissue paper before so I was just trying to follow directions.  When I wasn’t successful, I stopped and thought about the process.  I asked myself, “why are we using tissue paper?”,  “why do I want to do this?”.  Then I realized it was a way to add color and layers.  I’ve done this often with painted and printed papers, so I approached it the third time like I would if I were using paper instead of tissue.  And, I like this final spread.

I painted the pages gold and while it was drying I painted a piece of white tissue paper with red, lime green and gold.  Then I glued down some pink and brown polka dot tissue and pink and brown striped tissue.  I covered that with white acrylic spread on with a credit card.  Over that I used pink acrylic on a checkered rubber stamp, and lime green acrylic on a homemade foam stamp.  I cut a heart from my painted tissue and glued it on the left page.  I stamped a foam heart-in-a-square stamp with white acrylic and glued it on the right page.  I tore random pieces from the painted tissue and glued them on the bottom of the pages.  Lastly I scribbled randomly with a graphite pencil.

I am enjoying these challenges very much.  Thank you, Michelle!

Remember last month when I did my first GPP Street team challenge and tried to cut snowflakes?  That was a disaster.  This month the crusade is to create a journal page (actually I think it said spread, but I misread it and only did a page) with X’s and O’s.  Here is my page.  I’m not thrilled with it, but I rarely ever am when I know people are going to be looking at it.  But I’m really pushing myself this year to share my art whether I think it’s “good enough” or not, so here it is:

One of the things I put on my dream/goal list for this year is to accept any opportunities that come to me.  An unexpected opportunity showed up yesterday.  I had subscribed to Michelle Ward’s GPP Street Team, but it had ended for 2009 so I had forgotten that I’d signed up.  Yesterday she posted a new “crusade”.  I just about skipped even reading it, then I recognized it as a new opportunity.

The new challenge she posted had to do with cutting and using paper snowflakes.  Sounds easy enough, I thought, so I tried it.  Apparently I have never made paper snowflakes.  I thought I had, but now I’m thinking that I must have tried it, failed miserably and decided to never try it again.  It took me forever! to cut out two half way decent ones.  But I persevered and did a journal spread.  It doesn’t look good, but I am proud of myself for actually doing it and in my new spirit of self-acceptance, I am even going to post a picture of it here.

The one Michelle did was beautiful, so please don’t make mine give you a bad impression of the challenge.  I am going to continue to do the challenges…after all that’s the purpose, to push me out of my comfort zone.  I just didn’t realize that cutting paper snowflakes was such a challenge for me.

My photo for today is the weather forecast. I snapped a picture of the forecast on the computer.   It’s going to be sleeting, snowing, strong north winds and wind chill temps down to -30 degrees!