Be You ~ inspired by Vera Lane Studio Back to Back image

Hi everyone! There were several fabulous new releases this week in the Vera Lane Studio Etsy shop and today I am featuring two from the Back to Back set. As soon as I saw this set, I had an idea of the front facing girl standing out from the crowd and not following it. Although the set comes with two awesome sayings, I created one to encourage her to be authentic and celebrate her uniqueness.

I printed the image showing us her back five times and the front facing one just once on white cardstock. All of the clothing were printed onto designer paper, with the five being the same, and the other being on brightly coloured patterned paper. These were shaded with coloured pencil, and fussy cut to fit the original girls. The girls were coloured with a mix of Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils, again keeping the five with brown hair and giving the one in front vibrant blue hair. She was also given a set of three punched flowers for her hair because that's how she rolls :) They were all fussy cut leaving a narrow white border and matted with black to leave a second black border. The clothing was adhered to each girl and only the one in front was popped up on foam tape to help her stand out.

The background was dipped several times into layers of  Faded Jeans and Peacock Feathers Distress Oxides which had been smushed onto my craft sheet and spritzed with water. Each layer or dipping was dried before the next was added, making sure that some white space was left at the end. The bottom row of images needed to be grounded so a piece of book text was torn and adhered to the bottom of the background. This was pushed back with white gesso to knock back the text. Pattern was added with Cornflower Blue Archival Ink and a text and circles stamp from Indigi Blu Tasty Textures stamp set. Jet Black Archival Ink was used to add one of the circles from Stampotique Original Kate's Doodle Cube stamp block. To bring the star of the page even more attention, a small strip of the border cut from the Pretty Ladies Collage sheet was layered beneath her feet along with a skinny piece of washi. Waste not, want not...LOL.

White texture paste was added to the background through AALL & Create Lotza Dotz stencil to brighten and break up some of the more solid areas of the background. The wording was printed onto white cardstock, cut into individual words, and matted with black. Foam tape was used to adhered the words to the bottom of the page. A simple border was doodled around the outside edges of the page and black Big Brush pen was used to hide the white edges before the page was matted with black cardstock which serves as a frame. To bring in a little more of the pink from the star's clothing, two shades of pink dots were added to the border in four places, and the openings of the wording were also coloured in pink.

Thanks for joining my Back to Back friends and me today. We are delighted that you did. To see this wonderful image set, as well as the other new releases be sure to pop over to the Vera Lane Studio Etsy shop and also check out the Vera Lane Studio Facebook group where my talented teamies and other members of our VLS community have shared their creations. You'll be delighted you did!

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie