What on earth is under paper, you ask? If you use any kind of messy creating materials, you probably first put something on your table, desk or other work surface to protect it from the mess. If paper is what you use to protect the work surface, then that is your under paper. Most of the time, I am using plain newsprint under my messy projects and toss them when I clean up. However, if you want to do mixed media, collage, or card making, those under papers just might have valuable art that you can use. Save the good scraps in a box and let them be a part of your next project.

The art challenge for week 5 of the Documented Life Project was to use “Under Paper” and the Journal Prompt was: “What lies beneath?”

Jan:
The only under paper I could find was papers that I had saved when geli printing. I always have scrap paper next to my geli plate to roll off excess paint from my brayer or to stamp off left over paint from stencils and texture tools. For this challenge, I cut several of those papers into small squares and glued them to my page as a quilt design. Then I machine stitched across the squares to give my quilt a finished look. I remembered a small pillow I have tucked away that one of my grandmas made for me when I was a little girl. I put a picture of the pillow on top of the quilt. The embroidery on the pillow says:

Bed Fellows

Her bed contains a rabbit
And a little panda bear,
A Favorite wind-up toy
And a doll with curly hair.
There’s a piggy bank for pennies
And a clownish puppet man, 
Her bed contains so many things
There is hardly room for Jan.

Melinda: I had been working on water coloring for the Derwent Academy and I decided to use my paper towel from cleaning off the paints and my practice paintings as my underpaper. I am still in the early stages of learning water color, but I know that everything can just take time and practice to learn it.

My Princess:
The kids used the under paper from painting the circles for their Color Wheel pages and tried to make a picture from it using markers.

Ninja Boy: