Week 49 challenge was to draw or trace a hand. I tried a bit of drawing, but it didn't look good, so I fell back on the tracing option. I'm not that crazy about my hands, they are short and stubby, so I found this challenge difficult. But it wouldn't be a challenge if it was easy.
I used a page that I liked a lot as a background, and I'm planning to let it shine through. The golden wavy bits are where I used packing tape to pick up paint from my Gelli plate, and I stuck the packing tape to the page. Because I had picked up so much golden paint, the packing tape wasn't adhesive enough, hence the wave pattern.
For the hand itself, I chose a piece of newsprint that was used to protect my desk when spraying paint and to clean up my stamps.
For the tip-in, on which I glued the newsprint, I chose an art postcard I picked up at an exhibition last year.
So there you go - all done. A few more weeks to go before I finish the 2014 challenges. I'm already behind on the
2015 Documented Life Project challenges, so I'll be kept busy over the next few weeks. Somehow, I feel I'm going to be perpetually in catch-up mode.
Week 50. Aaaah. The Fantasy Vacation Spot challenge. They all chose Bora Bora. I chose the Maldives, no surprise there. Not my best art endeavour. I'm rushing through them too much. But my watercolour tip-in isn't too bad (except the tree trunk is a bit thick). I must try to use more watercolours in my 2015 DLP challenges.
The challenge for Week 48 was to depict gratitude in a creative way. And due to a bad link, I could not see how the artists had interpreted this challenge. So I was on my own!!
I picked an ugly page, all ugly greens and purples, and I covered it in gesso. Even then, it was still ugly. So I was going to have to do something more radical.
Well, I dug up an old map of Dublin, and when I looked for our address, I found that our estate didn't even exist at the time I had bought that map, so I was delighted with that. And definitely a sure sign that it was time to decommission that map. 
I chose a page with pastel colours, but they were a bit too bright so I toned it down with gesso. I cut a little house shape from an old Gelli print, and glued it to the page. And I also glued a cartoon from a newspaper article that spoke to me. I applied a little paw mark (IKEA kiddie marker). And, since I was still far behind the rest of the group, I called it done. 
and yesterday. Yes, I admit it, I'm wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Just don't have the energy to pick something new. Plus I have a bad back today and it had to be something easy to put on.
I had always wanted to paint the desert outside Las Vegas. We were lucky to have a view from our room in the Aria hotel that was just perfect. I painted this little watercolour sketch on our first morning, as the sun was rising over the mountains
