Love and Anger

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Layered". My piece this week is inspired by one of my favorite songs, Love and Anger by Kate Bush.

The specific part of the lyrics that were running through my mind when I created this piece was:

It lay buried here, it lay deep inside me, it's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it to anyone.  It could take me all my life, but it would only take a moment to tell you what I'm feeling.

If you're unfamiliar with the song and you'd like to check it out, you can find it here.

Obviously, given that this week's theme revolves around layers, I wanted to bring a lot of depth and dimension into my project.  That probably doesn't show up too well in the main photo, but hopefully the other pictures will give you an idea of the depth and layers that are included.

Ok, a quick skip through what I did...

1. I started out by stamping and colouring the two men with promarkers, blending Distress Inks onto the edges in places.
2. Using a craft knife, I cut open the chests to make doors.
3. I created shallow boxes from black card, which sit behind the doors and hold the hearts.  The base of each was covered with a piece of Destinations card.
4. The hearts were stamped and coloured then mounted on 3d foam.
5. I used a piece from the Destinations paper stack for the rear side of the doors and added brads as the door handles.
6. The text was printed on the computer.
7. The background was a piece from the Retro Grunge paper stack, stamped with Tim Holtz's "rays" stamps, one of my favourites.
8. Finally the whole piece was matted onto white, then black card.

 Luckily I had a deep enough frame to house this piece, it's probably about an inch or so deep in total!  I've also included a photo here of the red man with his doors closed, just to show that they worked, and that I did take the time to colour the parts you wouldn't normally see! lol

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! :)

Born, never asked

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Spritz, Sprays and Stencils". How to explain my entry this week without typing a mini-novel that will bore you to tears? I'll try to make it brief!

I have been a huge fan of multimedia artist Laurie Anderson for over 25 years. I have seen her perform more times than I can remember, I have a signed copy of her career retrospective and she was even the subject of my final degree dissertation back in my college days. I'm sure that many (if not most) of you won't be familar with her work, it's definitely more "arty" than mainstream. She sings on some albums, tells stories on others and is a gifted violinist. Above all she is the queen of digital technology, frequently inventing the instruments she uses in her music. My piece this week is inspired by her track "Born, Never Asked", which I love for her emotive violin playing. If you'd like to give it a listen it can be found here.

I started out by making 2 stencils for this piece - the first was a block of numbers, used in the centre panel in the bottom row. The second was the lyrics of the song that inspired the piece, which are:

It was a large room, full of people. All kinds. And they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind that curtain?

I used that stencil in the top-left and centre-right panels. Oh, by the way, while we're talking about making your own stencils, it's an activity that definitely has it's pros and cons! Yes, you have a unique stencil of your own design that is perfectly suited to the project you're working on, and once made, you can use time and again. However, and it's a big "however", be prepared to spend hours picking tiny pieces of plastic out of the stencil and then even longer finding them in your hair, on your clothes, in your mouth and even in your food!

Ok, a quick skip through what I did on each panel, starting top left and working left to right.

• Coloured with blended Distress Inks, stamped with letters stamp and stencilled with text, both brown Distress Ink (I forget which brown). The hand was moulded from paper clay and coloured with Promarkers.
  
• Letter blocks paper from Tim Holtz's Lost and Found stack.
  
• Stamped the hand and coloured it with Promarkers. Edged the tile with brown Distress Ink (same edging on all panels).
  
• Coloured the tile with blue Distress Stain. Splattered blue and red Distress Stain on my craft mat and pressed the tile onto it then stamped the ticket.
  
• Photo from the Lost and Found stack.
  
• Covered the tile with Tissue Tape then painted it with green Claudine Hellmuth paint. Stencilled the text with red C.H. paint.
  
• Background is text blocks from Lost and Found stack. Coloured the base of a grunge block with brown Distress Ink then stamped dates image on it. Coloured the grunge T with black Distress Ink and fixed them both in place.
  
• Coloured tile with blended orange and yellow Distress Ink then stamped numbers grid on it. Stencilled numbers with Aged Mahogany Distress Ink.
  
• Coloured the tile with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink and stamped the dots with Dusty Concord Distress Ink. Used a black Distress Marker to edge the main details on the man stamp then stamped it on Kraft Resist paper. Inked it and stamped again on white card. Cut out the man's face and fixed it to the Kraft Resist image then fixed both onto the tile.
  
• Finally I fixed all the tiles together with the Tiny Attacher and mounted them onto black card.
  

Looking back at it now, it's clear to me that I was also playing around with ideas of scale - big hand/small hand, big numbers/small numbers, big text/small text. I confess that I wasn't aware of it while I was doing it, it must have been subconscious, lol I have a running joke with a friend of mine, any time we look at someone's art, whether it be in a gallery or on a blog, one of us, at some point, will say "Do you see what they're doing? They're playing with ideas of scale!". It's quite possible that that was rattling around somewhere in my head during the making of this piece.

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! :)

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

This weeks theme on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Depths of Distress".   A few days back I was watching news reports about both the Eurozone crisis and the collapse of parts of the banking industry in various places around the world and it started one or two wheels turning in my head, but then I eventually thought no more of it.  When it came time to think about this week's challenge I had this idea of making an updated version of the Japanese proverb of the 3 Wise Monkeys - "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".  Luckily, in my house mansion, apart from my craft room, an entire wing of my spacious estate is devoted solely to stamps of animals and 3 of the rooms contain my entire collection of monkey stamps in various positions :)

A-n-y-w-a-y... long story short, on my way to my stampatorium I kept getting lost between my golf course and private day spa. Without access to my collection of monkey stamps, I had to abandon the monkey idea completely! That's when I thought back to the banking stuff I had been watching on tv and although they'd used different terminology, it wasn't a huge leap to realise that one thing the interviewed bankers kept implying was that they'd seen no evil, heard no evil and spoken no evil.  So there you have it, three '50s type bankers, complete with stylish modern accessories representing an update to the ancient Japanese proverb!

I spritzed the background card with a little water then dabbed on spots of Distress Stain all over it.  When it was dry I went over it with a few layers of white Distress Stain to soften the colour and stamped the Tim Holtz numbers stamp on top, finally finishing with more white Distress Stain.  I also wiped it with a baby wipe to make it a little more grainy.

I cut out the suits and hats from a sheet of Kraft Resist paper and coloured them with Distress Ink (you could also use Distress Stain but Distress Ink pad and blending tool give a much stronger contrast in the glazed areas of the Kraft Resist).  The shirts and ties were cut freehand with scissors (I didn't even draw them first, I just kept snipping until they looked right.  I know, I know, crafting without a safety net - I live life on the edge!).  The ties were coloured with Barn Door Distress Ink.

I stamped the clowns from the Big Top stamp set and cut out the central face from each image and coloured them with Promarkers.  The accessories were cut from black cardstock and I cut the ipod from black and white card and added twisted wires for the headphones.  I cut a half inch from the bottom of the two background figures so that the added height of the middle figure would make it look like the group was looming threateningly over the viewer.  The two background figures were mounted on black foam to raise them above the background, then the middle figure was further mounted above the duo behind.  I mounted the whole piece onto black card and then onto the front of a white greeting card blank.

So there you have it, a bit of crafting, a bit of Japanese religious history and a bit of topical commentary on society - what more can you want?  lol

Apology:  It has been brought to my attention that some parts of my story in the first two paragraphs are out-and-out lies - specifically in the parts that mention my home.  I've read and re-read it but try as I might I can't find anything wrong.  Still, I'd be failing in my duty, dear reader, if I didn't point it out to you!

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! :)