Always Be Yourself ~ Challenge #40 The East Wind

Hi everyone. Happy October! Today marks the start of a new challenge at The East Wind. This time the theme is Add Texture which can be done in so many ways...wet or dry embossing, adding fibres, lace, fabric, layers of stencilling, inks, paint, torn edges, just to name a few. On the first challenge of the month, all of the DT use the same image, the one from that month's newsletter. This time, the image is called Dragon's Tear and I LOVE it! I am a huge fan of dragons and was delighted to colour up this little baby.

I coloured him with a mix of Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils, adding Clear Wink of Stella to the liquid, shimmery gel pen to outline the bottle, and Glossy Accents to Baby's eye. I wanted all the shimmer because this is magic! I fussy cut the image leaving a narrow white border and then matted it in black cardstock, trimming it out again. Foam tape was added to the back of the image to add dimension and create a shadow around it when popped up.

The background began with my usual 6 x 8 inch rectangle of mixed media paper to which I added sprinkles of Purple and Turquoise Brusho crystals. Water was spritzed over this and the background was tiled to blend and create runs. Once dry, more crystals were added in a few places and then moved around with the TH Spritzer tool to create the tiny drips. Love that effect. Stamping was added with Forget-Me-Not Archival ink and Joggles Sparkles background stamp. Jet Black Archival ink was applied to a TH script stamp and rolled on here and there.

The computer-generated sentiment was printed onto white cardstock and matted with black. Foam tape was added to the back of each section and three flat pearls became the dots. A length of black punched border was added under the first section for emphasis. Whenever I spray ink, I often use ATC size pieces of white cardstock to mop up the final bits of overspray. I keep this stack handy so that when I want to add a coloured detail I can punch or stamp from these. It gives a different look from using coloured cardstock and seems to fit better with the backgrounds I create. I stamped Ryn's raindrop (or teardrop) stamp onto a green spritzed paper using Black Archival ink and then fussy cut them. Glossy Accents was added to each and foam tape was added to the back. The green ink has mica in it so they shimmer as well as shine. That makes me happy :)

To complete the page, even more texture, besides all of the layers of stencilling and stamping, was added when I adhered some ink sprayed cheesecloth under the bottle. To balance the weight of the image, a checked photo corner matted with black was added to the top left corner and the same washi tape wasd into semi circles and added to the right side to create flow. A black border was doodled around the edge. Black Big brush Pen was used to darken the edges and the background was matted with black cardstock to frame it and provide contrast.

Thanks for joining Baby and me today. We are glad that you did and hope that a little good magic comes your way. To see the rest of the amazing DT creations, pop over to The East Wind Challenge blog. They are yummy. We would love it if you played along with our Add Texture challenge.

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie