Queen of all she surveys

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Stripes".   I love stripes!  I suggested this theme because stripes have a strong, graphic boldness, yet at the same time they offer a lot of varied possibilities - crisp, distressed, horizontal, vertical, diagonal - there are so many ways to go with them!

I started out with a plain manilla 6x3 tag (something else I love, they're a great surface for stamping and ink work).  I stamped the face and then stamped it on some post-it notes and cut them out to use as a mask, which I applied to the face.  With the face protected I used an ink blending tool to apply various distress inks around the tag and then stamped the text, the black scratches that just peek out to the right of the crown and the black dots.  I also splattered with a little water to give some light spots in places.

The crown was a notepaper stamp, over stamped with text scallops and the curvy chessboard design.  I coloured it with promarkers and some picket fence distress stain, applied with a waterbrush then cut it out and fixed it in place.  The letters for "BOSS" were cut from the subway sign stamp, coloured with promarker and fixed in place.

The crown was much wider than the tag so I cut off the excess from the left side and used some of it as a collar for Queeny - that's what I've decided I'm going to call her from now! :)  I removed the mask and used promarkers for her heart and beauty mark and coloured the lips with some Fired Brick distress ink rubbed onto my craft mat, spritzed with water and applied with a waterbrush.

My first thought was to restamp her face on some coloured paper and tear it into strips to apply onto the tag, when I realised that basically that's what the post-it notes I'd used as a mask already were!  I tore strips from the mask and fixed them to her face in the appropriate places.  I love how the strips have the text on them in some parts and were coloured by some of the ink I applied to the tag.  I especially love the line you can see where the two post-it notes were joined together, I think it's a great detail and I love happy accidents like that! :)  Finally I edged her face with a grey promarker to give a little extra depth to the piece.

There you go, that's about it!  This is one of my favourite pieces of recent times, I hope you like it too! :)

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

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