My Art - journal tip in

This is my tip in pages for a journal project I am involved in on another group. The theme was nursery rhymes and fairy tales so I decided to do The Ugly Duckling. I downloaded the images off the internet. The one on the right is colour printed and the one on the left was laser printed and I watercoloured it.
The background is watercolour paper with liquid watercolour randomly applied with a foam brush. It was an offcut from my Christmas card project I did a couple of years ago. I sewed four pockets into each page to hold tags. The tags have letters on the ends and spell " IT'S" "ONLY" "SKIN" "DEEP". You can only see the two middle words on the front. The tags have quotes on them such as " Is different, ugly?", "This too shall pass", "Is it true? Can you be really sure it is true?", etc. The quotes I made up in reference to the story of the duckling coming to see himself as he really is!! Don't we all need to ask ourselves such questions to come to recognize the beauty of our true selves! Added some fibers to the edges of the pages where the sewing ends. Really like that this piece works on several different levels.
I have last months pages to upload yet! Still on the camera! My time flies!!

Therese

My first ABC challenge: to create hidden tags! Can you guess where the tags are hidden? The tags actually are connected to the letters and are hidden behind the page. I used the fall theme (a challenge on the NG list) for this spread. I started with thick pasty white acrylic paint as the bottom layer on both pages. Layered on some ink in several colours, stamped leaf images, added yet more colour and finally stippled on dark brown ink around the edges to help highlight the real maple leaf I pressed last year. I added more stamped images around the edges of the pages. At this point the acrylic paint is mostly covered up but gives some texture and luminesence to the pages.

I layered several pages on the right hand side so I could cut the slots for the tags and there would be some substance to support the tag. I created the tags, added dark brown letters to the ends then tied on some fiber. Once the slots were cut I applied double sided tape to the other side of the page to create pockets for the tags and glued this page to the next one. Worked very nicely!! I punched some circles from fall images from an old calendar and cut them in half to highlight the slot for each tag. Added some "stitching" with a marker around the edges. I did some journaling on the tags themselves - details about the techniques I used and some thought about the theme and process of creating the two page spread. Thanks to Linda for the challenge!!

Therese