Documented Life Project 2015 - Week 1

New Year, New DLP!
I'm hoping to use this forced immobilisation to catch up on the DLP challenges. Let's see how I get on.

Week 1.
This year, the challenges are multi-layered -
The theme for the month of January is "the blank page and how to face it"
The art challenge for this week is "book paper"
And the journal prompt is "be your own goal keeper"

Here is how I interpreted it. Colours and style inspired by Roben-Marie Smith.

The format is larger than last year, and there is no space assigned to journal/diary keeping. I like the larger format - more room to play with (but also more blank page to fill). But I might add my own journaling, as it is one of the aspects of DLP that I enjoyed the most. And I've added a tip-in, otherwise, I'll never reduce my stash of cards (Tip-ins were a big feature of the 2014 DLP, but they seem to have abandoned them so far this year), and I might use them for the journaling aspect.

When using book paper as backgrounds, the DLP artists always seem to pick random books, magazines or other types of papers that they don't seem to have a connection with. Now, I could never do that of course. I'm not going to go to a second-hand book shop to buy a book just for the purpose of creating art backgrounds. I have to pick items that mean something to me, in some form or other. The backgrounds for this page were:

1. a page from the latest Boden catalogue, chosen for its beautiful flower and colours, but which is also very appropriate, given my first pledge for the year
2. a couple of pages from a business magazine that I picked up in the transit lounge in Philadelphia airport - partly chosen for the interesting titles, and partly for the inspiring illustration
3. a page from my sacrificed book, Petite, a story about a young girl who suffers from anorexia - not that I've ever been there, but I'm interested in eating healthy and staying fit, so there is a connexion. Plus I actually read the book
4. the last item is a little saying "Every end has a new beginning", which I cut out from a box of Pukka tea bags (my favourites are ginger&lemongrass and three-cinnamons), which I thought very fitting with new year resolutions and goals for the year.

I loved Roben-Marie Smith's idea of stamping on a book page and cutting around the stamped area, so I copied that, with my own stamp. Here is a close-up:

Next - using gesso - a tricky one for me.