Irish Aurora ~ The East Wind Challenge #51 project

Hi everyone. It's time for our mid-month challenge over on The East Wind blog. Our theme this time is Recycle /Re-purpose which is one of my favourite things to do in my mixed media projects. I often save packaging, corrugated cardboard, junk mail, bits of ribbon or string...anything I think might be fun to incorporate in my art. Bit of a magpie I guess :) I think most people who play with mixed media are so I'm in excellent company.

For this project, I chose to feature the sweet faced Aurora St. Patrick's Day (on sale as this goes live) because she only comes out once a year. I coloured her with a mix of Polychromos and Prismacolor pencils and then fussy cut her leaving a narrow white border. Black cardstock was added to the back and trimmed out again to create a mat. She was then popped up on foam tape for dimension.

The 6 x 8 inch recycled white cardboard background had yellow and two shades of green acrylic paint brayered over it to get the background layer. Viridian Archival Ink was applied with a crosshatch stamp and Joggles Nonsense Latin Text stamp was rolled on using Jet Black Archival Ink. A Stencil Girl X stencil was sponged through with White Linen Dylusions paint and once dry a few of the x shapes were outlined loosely with black pen. To create the ground for Aurora, a piece of corrugated cardboard was ton and then the top layer peeled back to expose the corrugation. A piece of drywall mess was re-purposed into a second layer of ground and a star brad was used to anchor the left corner. Two clouds were die cut from French book text, matted with black, and the smaller one popped up on foam tape.

The sentiment, a freebie from Create With TLC (Thanks, Paulette), seemed like the perfect accompaniment to Aurora. It was fussy cut , matted with black, and  I coloured in some of the shamrocks with green gel pen. It was then popped up on foam tape. A simple black pen border was doodled around the edges and they were inked with Black Big Brush pen. Two tiny green clothespins were added to the left side before the black mat was added to frame the page.

Thank you for joining Aurora and me today. We both want to wish you a Happy St. Patrick's Day on the 17th. To see the rest of the wonderful projects by my talented teamies, be sure and pop by The East Wind blog. We would love to have you play along with our Recycle/Re-purpose challenge.

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie