Love You, Mom ~ The East Wind new FB contest

On the 21st of each month a new contest begins on The East Wind Facebook page. The theme for this month-long contest is Mother's Day which will fall within this contest period. I chose to create a tag featuring this absolutely gorgeous image by Unky called Aurora Love You. I coloured Aurora with my Prismacolor pencils before fussy cutting her and matting her in black cardstock. Colouring her hair and that sweet face was a treat. She was popped up on foam tape and set aside to await her background.

I used a Wendy Vecchi Art Parts scallop tag with trim as the base for my tag. I covered the extra scalloped piece with scraps of patterned paper and traced the tag shape onto a larger scrap. Stamping was done on both pieces with a text stamp and Brilliance Archival ink in Rocket Red Gold. Two torn pieces of French text from some thrift store books was inked with Vintage Photo and adhered to the tag background. Three banner flags from sparkly scraps were adhered as bunting to the upper portion of the background. Then I made the trek upstairs to do some machine sewing to the background before adhering it to the tag base. I stitched both across the bunting flags and over the text paper to add subtle texture and interest.

The background was adhered to the tag and then stencilling was done by pouncing gesso through TCW's Mini Tiny Circles and Well Rounded stencils. Coffee Archival ink was sponged through Memory Box's Rings and Puddles stencil. Doodling was added around the edges, around the larger gesso circles, and to outline the added text paper and flags. One of the hardest things I had to learn with mixed media was to keep the doodling loose and a little messy. It just looks better when it is less precise.

The scalloped edge was adhered to the back of the tag and flat white pearls were added. Aurora was placed so that her hands were at the bottom of the main section and the bow overlapped the scalloped edge. A length of baker's twine was adhered above the bunting and a punched star matted in black covered the hole in the tag. Black ribbon with white stitching was glued to the back of the tag as a topper.

Thanks for stopping by today to visit with Aurora and me. We appreciate your fine company. We'd love to see you play along with The East Wind's new contest on our Facebook page. It's always inspirational and a delight to see how you use these fabulous images and who knows...you could be our next winner.

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie