The challenge for week 7 in the Documented Life Project was to draw a shape, repeat the shape and add color.

Jan:
When I read the challenge, I was tempted to just say my week 7 challenge was combined with what I did for week 6, since it was filled with circles. But since the whole idea of doing these challenges is to stretch my creativity and try new things, that would not work. I was playing with some doodling and came across a doodle design that was fun to draw. Helen Williams, the author of the blog, A Little Lime, where I found it, called this design a feather. (By the way, Helen makes beautiful art and shares many of the patterns she uses. Check out her blog!)

This is what I drew in my sketch book and decided that this repeating curly shape would be my shape for the challenge.

To me this design looked more like something growing in the ocean than a feather, so I drew several stalks with the repeating shape on cardstock, colored them, and cut them out. I glued this to a portion of this gelli print I recently made with shells.

To plant my design in the ocean, I cut out a strip of the gelli print and glued it on the bottom of the picture over the base of my “shape” stalks. I also cut out a couple of the gelli printed shells and glued them at the floor of my ocean to add depth.

For the hair-like strands coming out of my plants, I tied knots in string and glued the strings in place with mod podge. The repeating shape that became my plants still seemed too stark. I wanted them to look like they were in water. I wondered what it would look like to paint watercolor on plastic wrap and glue that over the whole picture. I painted a piece of plastic wrap and let the watercolor dry. Then I covered my picture with mod podge and laid the plastic wrap over the picture with the watercolor side down. It was quickly apparent that idea would not work. I did not think the mod podge would dry underneath the plastic and I didn’t like the way the plastic looked. So I pulled it off and loved the effect left by the watercolor overlay on the mod podge.

Melinda:

I got behind on my pages so here is my Week 6. I wanted to do something with ballet because after getting home from our trip, I was finally able to go back to dance class. All of my classmates have been working on pointe lately which is both inspiring and frustrating because that has always been a dream of mine. My hope is to keep strong enough throughout my pregnancy so I can start doing pointe after I get back into dance after having baby. I had this picture by Mary Foley pinned to my daughter’s board. I liked all the different elements that were used to make this picture.

When making my page inspired by this picture, I decided to stick with using paper this time (I’m reorganizing all my craft stuff and didn’t want to get everything out at that time). I spotted the cover of a magazine that had beautiful icy branches that made me think of the snowflake dance in the Nutcracker. I wanted to keep with that theme as I did my ballet shoes and the rest of the page.
For week 7, I chose circles as my continued shape.

I have been wanting to do some paper weaving on a page lately, so I pulled out some polka dot paper to use for my background. I then drew several circles with different doodle techniques and added my colors. I thought about what circles represented in my life at this point and thought of how they are never ending, so I wrote “Continue” to remind myself to just keep going no matter what comes my way.