It’s easy to transform something that doesn’t look that great into something that looks wonderful. It’s even easy to take something that is perfectly good and useable (to someone) and transform it into something else (like taking a bridesmaid dress in perfect condition and remaking it into Elsa dress-up clothes for the kids.) But when it comes to art work, it’s harder to cover up something good. If it’s good, then leave it alone, right?

The art challenge for week 7 in the Documented Life Project asked us to cover up good stuff. The journal prompt was “Going Undercover”.

Jan:
For this challenge I decided to cover up some seashells I had drawn with watercolor pencils. They were not really a picture, but I was pretty happy with how they turned out and was saving them to look at later to see if I had improved my seashell drawing skills.

I am not journaling on my art work, but I try to let the journal prompt influence how I do the challenge. I decided the best way for my shells to go undercover was to put them under the sea. I covered my page with mod-podge hoping I could use alcohol inks on top of the slick surface. I don’t know if I rushed it and did not let the mod-podge dry enough, but when I started adding alcohol inks on top, they did not spread well and the surface became a little sticky. But it still worked for my underwater background.

I cut out fish, coral and sea plants from glossy paper I had made with alcohol inks to add to my collage. My sister taught me this technique a couple years ago at our girls get-together. These papers were made by placing a sheet of waxed paper in an embossing folder and running that through an embossing machine. Then I placed the waxed paper on top of a piece of glossy paper with a piece of copy paper on top of that and ironed on the copy paper. The wax embossing transferred to the glossy paper and became a resist when the alcohol ink was added to the glossy paper. It makes an interesting design element for collage and paper crafts.

You can still see my undercover shells if you look closely.

Melinda:

I found an old book page that got pulled out of one of mom’s old books on her shelf. I have no idea what book it was from so mom let me use the page for art. I saw that the story was about dwarves, and I wanted to draw one. I always liked the drawings that are done over book pages. I think they look neat. I am not a huge fan of layers so I stuck to just a couple.