Playing In Paint

I am so enjoying Dina Wakley's art journaling class. One of the assignments was to go outside of your comfort zone and create a page with at least 10 layers and to use three silhouettes. This isn't something you'd do for all of your journal pages (or, maybe you would...who knows?) but it was a great motivator to push myself to see what else I could come up with for the next layer.

I love the silhouettes of the fashion models that she uses on her pages and I plan to use those a lot in the near future. I have so many fashion mags laying around here it won't be hard to find some great poses to use as masks. But I wanted to use another mask for this exercise. I had some scrapbook paper that had outlines of birds on it. I just cut one out and used that as my mask.

There are paints, dyes, inks, oil pastels, dyed paper towels, etc. on this top page. I still have blue fingers from the spray inks. I didn't pay attention to where the nozzle was so I missed the stencil the first time and sprayed full force on my hands. No worries, I made a great imprint on a paper towel and will cut that out at some point to use on another page. But my fingers are definitely stained blue!

I had a great time with this lesson. Here is the opposite page in the journal. It's not finished yet. I may not do the whole ten layers for this one. I like how there's some white space here and there. I will add some more to it later but I want to think about it some more:

One of the next lessons she wants us to do involves self-portraits. Ugh! I am NOT photogenic and I was already thinking of reasons not to do it. One good thing about the lesson: I read the manual for my camera and have figured out how to use the self-timer. I'm ashamed to say I've not taken the time to figure that out before now! It was so strange taking photos of myself...such a weird feeling. I've already taken over 100 photos and out of all of those may have three that are usable. Even then, I will probably use only part of my face. But I'm going through with the lesson, just for the experience.

The class has definitely made me want to journal. So there's a plus right there! OK, off to figure out this next assignment.