............... or I hope it's as sunny for you lovely kind visitors as it is here this morning, so sunny it made taking photos of my entry for this week's PaperArtsy Blog Challenge impossible to take without some shadows especially at 8:00 am with the sun just peeking over the garage, lol! Never mind, I'll put up with ;D!
Anyway, this week over on the fabulous PaperArtsy Blog it was my Twitter friend (hope to meet her at Ally Pally next month :D), Julie Ann's turn to be main guest designer once again and as always her project over the 3 days was full of fun and imagination not to mention wonderful inspiration. A visit to her own blog is always fascinating not only for her lovely designs but I love the stories she often weaves into her posts. Her 3 mini canvasses (HERE) this time were based around The Green Man and I have to say I love the garden ornaments you often see in garden centres of this character. Now, I didn't have any of the ceramic masks to use for the face (really wanted to use a face and not a substitute flower or something) nor anything that looked like a suitable male face so I decided to use a stamp from a set of faces which I've had for years. I have no idea whose the set of stamps is and I think probably they are nolonger available but one of them suited my purpose and became THE GREEN LADY!
As I said, there's lots of shadow!
Here's my canvas (somewhat larger than those Julie Ann used) and my pieces of Fresco treated card. I later added quite a bit of watered down Honey Dew to tone it down a bit but the effect I wanted was dappled sunlight through a thick canopy of trees.
A few pics were taken very late at night so the colour is a bit lost here. I didn't have a suitable stamp for the background so I decided to apply Fresco paint through a woodgrain mask and then heat embossed with clear EP.
The stamping was done with Archival ink and clear embossed.
On the top edge of the canvas I applied Fresco through my new Lin Brown stencil (from PaperArtsy) and clear embossed as before.
I didn't have the lovely leaf stamps from PaperArtsy (must rectify that one) that Julie Ann used so I used some others from my stash, stamped onto my card and cut them all out, shaped them and clear embossed about half. As it was the early hours of this morning by this time I didn't have time to get them cold enough to crack but I still liked the contrast between shiny and matt surfaces.
To save time I didn't do the shrink plastic flowers either (although I do love Shrink) but die cut flowers from some sprayed background card I had in my stash ......... just look at that fab shimmer ............. and a butterfly. I also cut a second layer for the flowers from some gorgeous burnished metal mesh I bought when out for lunch with my buddy, Jo, last week and layered them with a brad before adding them to the side. I also added a few tendrils of rusty wire.
I hope you like my female alternative to Julie Ann's wonderful Green Man. I had such a lot of fun with this once I got going.
Well I'd better get my skates on as we have visitors calling in later and first I have to do a supermarket shop (groan!!!). I hope you all have a lovely Sunday followed by a pleasant week. Until next time ............
Hugs
Lesley Xx
