Quoth the Raven

Hello everyone, lovely to have your company here at Words and Pictures.  It's Tuesday: time for a new challenge at Fun With ATCs, and our theme for this fortnight is Gothic.  There's lots of inspiration from my fabulous team mates, so get your spook on and come and play along!

I've kept it quite simple this week, allowing this wonderful Crafty Individuals stamp to do most of the work.  It's a fabulous Edgar Allan Poe-ish image - I just love the looming tower, the dynamic raven, and the barbed wire criss-crossing it.

What's also great about it is that it's just marginally larger than ATC sized (2.5 x 3.5 inches is what we're looking for) so I was able to mount it onto thick chipboard and fold the borders of the image over to decorate the edges too.










I stamped in Versamark Watermark ink, and then embossed with Stampendous Fine Detail black embossing powder.  

I'm incredibly impressed with the "fine detail" achieved with the powder - it really is a very detailed image, and the powder has captured it perfectly.








I used Distress Markers to colour in the church tower, softening with water applied with a water brush to get a subtler look.

And then I simply blended Chipped Sapphire DI over areas of the image, leaving the moon glowing white, and keeping some highlighting on the raven himself.  I considered colouring him black, but decided I preferred the ghostly look!










I also thought about doing some spritz and flick to zhuzh up the background, but again decided on the simple route, leaving the image to shine.  

And if you catch it in the right light, it really does shine - almost to invisibility... which also seems suitably strange and Gothic, in accordance with our theme.




There have been so many glorious entries to recent competitions at Fun With ATCs - it's a real joy to visit them all, and it's incredibly hard to whittle them down to our top picks each time...  I hope you'll be keeping us all on our toes again with your Gothic ATCs - you'll find everything you need to know right here!  Thanks so much for stopping by, and I'll see you again soon, here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

It's a massively long poem, so I'm going to leave you with just the last couple of verses of The Raven:

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe