The objective of the presented experimental work was to perform monotonic tensile tests and observe damage occurring on the surface of a glass fiber mat reinforced epoxy resin. The experiments were performed on dogbone specimens machined from a 5.8 mm thick composite plate. The macroscopic response was revealed from load data and by using 2D digital image correlation. FE-based DIC was employed to measure displacement fields and calculate strain fields across the entire Region of interest. In addition, the gray level residuals extracted from the correlation analyses were utilized to detect discontinuities (i.e. damage initiation and growth) on the surface of the investigated specimens.