LifeBook Week 38: Journey to Acceptance (Heron)

The last LifeBook lesson I was able to do was week 9 back in February! The group is now up to Week 38! I've missed so much! Instead of frantically trying to catch up, I decided to pick up and continue with the current week and also try to do as many lessons as I can retrospectively.

This week, our guest teacher was the wonderfully talented Jill Berry. Jill has showed us how to use our own painted tissue paper and gel skins in collages. Like everything else, these techniques also require a certain amount of experimenting to get them right. I'd tried making gel skins before, but I could never find a substrate to peel them off successfully. Jill recommended page protectors and I've found the ones used in scrapbooking albums are just perfect for making gel skins. They peel away easily and stay in one piece!

This is my second attempt at this lesson as the first one went off on a tangent and was barely recognizable! This time I've followed Jill's 'Heron' project a lot more closely, and I'm glad to say, I'm quite satisfied with the results. However, I realize that copying somebody else's art will never be as meaningful as coming up with my own ideas. Having said that, I added a few elements that were my own, so it's not an exact copy.

I used a dabber to pattern the tissue paper for the sky, instead of using a stencil, like Jill did. I didn't get very good results with my stencils, for some reason. The sun is made out of a gel skin. I added some reeds cut out of painted tissue paper to balance the composition and I used a purple gelato to frame the entire picture.

Here are a few photos. If you click on them, you can see them larger in the photo gallery.

I'm also entering this page for the Kraaft Shaak September Challenge on Google Plus.