Fly Away

Hello all, and the warmest, and most colourful of welcomes to Words and Pictures!  


Thanks for double-hopping to the various destinations yesterday.  I'm aiming to do some hopping round Craftyblogland myself very soon.  Time never seems to be quite on my side at the moment!


I'm back today to share what I've come up with for the Compendium of Curiosities III Challenge 1, hosted by the fabulous Linda Ledbetter.  


There's a wealth of inspiration for the challenge from her amazing Curiosity Crew, as well as from Linda herself, not to mention from the man himself, Tim Holtz, with all the fabulous techniques in CCIII.

We're playing with Tim's Distress Paint marbling technique this first time out, found on p.43 of the book.

It's part of the game rules that we shouldn't give away the technique details... so that keeps things quicker for a start!












I've been playing with corrugated cardboard (no surprises there, then), a random piece left over from a ripped up box, about 12.5 x 5.5 inches, so just a little larger than one of the huge jumbo #12 tags.  













I did my marbling over the top of a layer of heavy gesso, using all my favourite shades of blue with some Picket Fence thrown in for good measure.









When I heat dried the Distress Paint, I held the heat for longer in certain places to get these fabulous bubbles from the gesso underneath.

I'm in love with the textured effect, and the lovely extra detail from the top layer of the technique.

It became pretty clear that what I had was a twilit summer sky...










I did some more marbling on to some Tissue Wrap, this time with a rainbow of colours across the papers.  

I glued the tissue onto white paper - you lose the translucence, but you get zingier colours.











Then I got busy with the Butterfly Frenzy Decorative Strip Die, and sorted my butterflies into shades (fiddly, but not as fiddly as gluing them all in place was!).

My Umbrella Man, cut out of ridged Grungeboard, had been sitting on the table for a few days.  He was planning to take part in another project, but I commandeered him for this one.












I shaded him in sombre browns and blacks, and gave him a little broken boardwalk to stand on.

The boards are made of pieces of wooden coffee stirrers liberated from my favourite coffee shop and dyed with Distress Inks.








Looking up at all the vividly coloured butterflies (are they real or in his imagination?) there was only one phrase fluttering through his (my) mind, again borrowed from a song (happening a lot round here lately)... One day I'll fly away.













Unfortunately there's neither an I'll nor an apostrophe in the ChitChat stickers so I had to go for the full version: I will.

It's quite nice as it shifts the emphasis of the thought slightly: I will fly away, or perhaps - like these butterflies, one day I will get the chance to fly away.  See, I told you I like playing with words!










As I mentioned, gluing the all butterflies down was the fiddliest bit...















... trying to make sure the colours were nicely graduated...









... sticking down the larger ones and then filling in the spaces with smaller and smaller butterflies...
















... into smaller and smaller spaces!












Once they were all in place I roughed up the edges a bit more, and inked them to match the darker, more sombre mood of Umbrella Man himself.  

Will he ever get to fly away, I wonder.










Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I know I've been terribly poor as a blog-visitor lately, but after a day with the dollshouses I usually just want to collapse in a heap.  Must do better!

I'll be back on Saturday with a couple more sneak peeks for you, but for now I hope you're all having a great week.  See you soon (I hope)!

The sky is full of dreams, but you don't know how to fly.
From This is your Life by The Killers

"The Guide says there is an art to flying," said Ford, "or rather a knack.  The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground, and miss."
From Life, The Universe, And Everything by Douglas Adams



I'd like to enter this as my project for Challenge 1 in the Compendium of Curiosities III Challenge hosted by Linda Ledbetter.
With all those colourful butterflies fluttering into the sky, I'd like to add this to Spring is in the Air (literally!) over at the That's Crafty Challenge Blog.
And there's an Anything Goes going on at A Sprinkle of Imagination - can't say no to that!