Second Floor Challenge

I had so much fun with the last second floor challenge from Julie and Nathalie, that I'm playing along again.  This time the challenge is to use a found object.  I have to start with a story to explain my found object inspiration.... A couple of weekends ago my husband and I camped in the beautiful Acadia National Park.  In June in Maine you can find a lot of lupines growing wild in fields and in Acadia there were many places where you could find them along the roadsides.  Also, as you may know, you cannot pick flowers in a National Park so here is a photograph of some of the lupines I "found" to use as my inspiration.

I just love the look of them and have tried to grow them in my garden at home, but they never over-winter for me.  It's always amazing how well they do in the wild.

Beautiful, don't you think?

On to the project!

I decided to make an art journal page and used a base of newspaper - hey, I find one of those in my paper box every morning ;-)  I first adhered it to my page, then lightly brushed it with gesso and then added watered down acrylic paints for color.

To create the lupines I wanted to try out a new to me technique learned from Martha Lever in her part of the 21 Secrets workshops where she teaches how to paint credit card flowers.  The stems are laid down with the edge of the credit card.  I'll add that the credit card is another found object - like everyone else, I get offers for credit cards and memberships in my mail - using one in an art project is a terrific use!

Next I created the flower petals by using cut bits of the credit card.

Here's a close-up that shows the petals and the texture from the paint.

Using yet another shape cut from the credit card, I tried painting in some leaves.  Lupines have a kind of pointed leaf that fans out - not sure that what I added was exactly what I was going for....

Here's my final art journal page after adding some handwriting, doodling and a border.

What did I learn?
1.  I am not a painter, and think I have very poor brush control, but using my fingers and pieces of things to         paint with can still be a lot of fun and give good results.
2.  I still don't like my leaves!!!!
3.  I'm amazed at how much better something can look when you add pen outlines and doodles.  It's that layer thing again!
4.  It's always good to push yourself to try something you haven't before.