"Your Grunge!" Challenge

Over on the Simon Says Stamp & Show Challenge blog today the new theme is "Your Grunge!". I've had grunge paper kicking around for quite some time but never really gotten around to using it much, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity.

Part of the inspiration for this piece was the title sequence of the recent series of Big Brother here in the UK. I really enjoyed the sinister circus/mad house feel used in the titles and set decoration of the show. Those who haven't seen it or are overseas can get a sense of what I mean here.

The circus letters, bunting, awning and curtain with a hole in it were all designed on the PC and cut on the Cricut using the SCAL program. The awning was cut from grunge paper, painted with acrylic paint and then overstamped with some Tim Holtz paint splatters. It was also sanded and inked to distress it further, before being glued in place inside a 2" deep frame from Ikea.

I used my TH design ruler (those grid markings are just so darned useful!) to mark the stripes on the curtain and then coloured it using promarkers. I distressed it with a walnut stain distress ink pad applied with an ink blending tool and then overstamped some paint splatters too. "For the eye" and "See All" were stamped separately and fixed to the curtain.

I wanted the eye to be quite a distance behind the hole in the curtain so I constructed a box from white card, and stamped the eye in the middle of the bottom surface before assembling it and sticking it to the back of the curtain. By sticking the base of the box to the rear of the frame it also allowed the curtain to stand 1/2 way between the front and back of the frame, adding more dimensionality to the composition.

I wanted the eye to look like a black and white photograph, though it's just a stamp. so I coloured it with various shades of grey promarker and then used the shape cut out from the hole in the curtain as a mask to apply a shadow around the eye. The circus letters were coloured with promarker and then stuck into place. At the very back is a piece of Graphic 45 striped paper and infront of that a partially coloured section of a TH clowns stamp.

I deliberately left some parts of this piece partially coloured or un-coloured as I wanted to stress the artifice of the whole piece and in a way make myself part of it all. The pointy hat is a section cut from a large notepaper stampe. coloured with promarkers then distressed with walnut stain. All of the elements were layered with 3d foam tape and the memo pins stuck into place.

I hope you like it :) As ever, click any of the pics to see a larger view!

Why not pop over to the challenge blog and see the amazing entries by the rest of the design team? Even better, join in the fun! :)

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $25 gift voucher again this week! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try?