Today is a Present

The Documented Life Project 2015 has started and this is my first contribution. I will be labelling all my projects this year with the label DLP15 to make it easy to find them. It works slightly differently from last year as all the themes and challenges are hosted on the new website. The artists themselves are working in an art journal but as I have mentioned here before I'm continuing to work in a planner and tipping all the pages I make in every week using washi tape.

The challenges also work slightly differently in that we will have monthly themes which for January will be: The Blank Page and how to face it. The Art Challenge for this week is Book Paper and the Journal Prompt: Be your own Goal Keeper. One thing however hasn't changed and that is that the project remains entirely free of charge.  That is wonderfully generous considering that this week alone we were treated to videos showing the 4 artists involved making their interpretation of this week's task. I loved watching it all but once I started I simply took off doing my own thing.

My pages are sized to fit into my planner and are 7 x 8.1/4". For this page I started by collaging on a collection of vintage book paper as per the challenge. I painted over these with gesso and then coloured this background with fluid acrylic paints and rubber stamping. I even did some gold embossing which is highly unusual for me. But I loved the effect. Hard to spot on the pictures though. Neither the camera nor the scanner are keen on glittery stuff.

I added words that I found in a magazine (The Simple Things) reading: Today is a present to be treasured. This is something that really spoke to me and also refers back to the quotation I mentioned a few days ago by Jean-Paul Sartre: There is only one day left, always starting over. It's given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk. It's up to us to honour this day and treasure it by making the most of it each and every time we receive such a gift. This message was brought home to me even more this morning reading about what happened to a good friend of us over the holidays.

I cut out the words and emphasized them with a variety of paints and marker pens as you can see above. I added the transparency (from a Klimt painting) as my Goalie! It will be me and her who have to make sure I stick to this goal all through the year. The edges of the collage were darkened with shimmer paint.