The challenge for week 6 of the Documented Life Project was to “Open your Pinterest board and be inspired.” As you can imagine, that opens the door to unlimited inspiration and interpretation for the challenge. I decided to only look at the pins on my art board and craft board and not look any further or I would spend all my time looking through Pinterest. This is my inspiration:This picture was a project the artist did with her children and you can check out how she did it here.

I cut out small pieces of colors and designs I liked from some magazine pictures and glued them randomly on my paper to cover the whole page.I knew I did not want to make a bird on a tree branch like the picture that inspired me because I like to take ideas I see and add my creativity to make it my own. I played around with drawing some butterflies but they were not cooperating with me. Since I was watching the opening of the Olympics, the circles became my inspiration. I drew my design and used an x-acto knife to cut out my stencil.I held the stencil in place with my fingers on top of the collage while I sponge painted black paint over the open areas of the stencil. Once I finished sponging, I hand painted a few more places on my picture where I felt I left too much of the collage showing. It needed a little more definition on some of the solid circles. Here is my finished page:

One of the fun things about doing these challenges is that I am encouraged to try something different- to “stretch” myself. Since I am only doing a small page for each challenge I can try things without it being overwhelming. That way if I find a new technique or idea that I want to try on a bigger scale, I can.

There are still people joining in on the Documented Life Project every week, so you can start any time. If you don’t want to do a planner or journal like many of the participants are doing, you can use the challenges like Melinda and I are. So far we have done each challenge on a half sheet of card stock just for the fun of creating. To see our project pages so far click on the Documented Life Project 2014 category at the right under Daily Posts.

Since Melinda just got back from her trip she is still catching up on things at home. We will share her week 6 challenge later.