Step #5: Seeing Beauty

Today I'd like to talk about seeing beauty. A sort of continuation of yesterday's post. But not. Basically once you get into the habit of it, you can see beauty even in ugly things. Take for instance the page I shared yesterday. I didn't like it. Yet I still went to the trouble of continuing on with it. I could have just covered it up with white paint and started again. But I did see potential in it - something that you will find to be very true once you just start. Explore different techniques and colors to cover up things that you don't like. Practice making it look like it's meant to be there and not just a cover-up. Even though that might sound a little hard at first, you'll get the hang of it. Now take a look at the above picture. I promise that it is the same page as yesterday. I know that it looks really different, but that's the point. I saw the beauty in the page. I added hot pink and orange and that changed the entire look. I stamped with bubble wrap using paint. Collage underneath the layers of paint just barely show through. And that gives the page interest. I stamped with both ink and paint. Hand carved stamps give it a very unique style. The chipboard letters spelling out the word 'magic' add dimension. I also stamped with commercial brand stamps. As you can see, I added a ton of layers on top of the initial paint layer shown in the last post. The collage is made of paper, ephemera and bits and pieces of everything in between. So today I challenge you to go ahead and look for the beauty in certain supposedly 'ugly' pages. It doesn't have to be hard if you don't make it. It's only as hard as you make it. Any and every page has a certain inner beauty to it. You just need to find it.