Singing Zinskis

Hello all!  A fairly quick post today - as well as a bit of a hop out of kin - just to say hello to the Singing Zinskis.  I called this pair of tags "Happy When I Sing" for the launch post of my new stamp sets (here at PaperArtsy if you missed it) - but this new post title was irresistible!  These are definitely on the Music side of EAB03's Music & Silence theme...

It's part of Leandra's introduction to the stamps, as well as my suggestion, that these quote stamps will play nicely with all styles and genres, so these tags partly came about from me wanting to make sure that was true... and partly because I just wanted to play with the adorable little rag doll from ZA03.







I already knew I wanted to give her a paper-pieced dress of musical notes, and had originally thought I'd use some old manuscript music paper.

But the book was buried under rather a big pile of stuff, and as I looked at the job of uncovering it I suddenly remembered that there's a musical Tim Holtz tissue tape, so I grabbed that instead.












If her dress is going to be musical against a plain background, in my head that immediately leads to the opposite version - a plain dress against a musical background - and so we're off into a pair of tags before you know it.












So that's how I started - one white-washed tag, and one tissue-tape-covered, white-washed tag. 












I did some subtle sponging for the background - Fresco paints in Hey Pesto and Blueberry mostly - and kept it very light and delicate.

The flower is one of Kay Carley's - it was a freebie in one of my PaperArtsy orders, and the bluebell heads seemed just right to provide some extra musical input on the tags.  More Blueberry paint for the bluebells, of course.









I used one of the doodly stamps from the same ZA03 set to give her some grassy support underfoot.

And you might be able to see some of the bubbles, stamped in Snowflake Fresco, adding a little extra buoyancy to the mood.











Of course it all started with this wonderful William James quote - so full of joy, and very much how I feel about singing (as well as crafting).

But now I had two tags, so I needed a second set of words... 













Roll up, Friedrich Nietzsche, with another thought full of truth for me (and equally applicable to crafting - I find it hard now to remember that there was a time-before-crafting for me!).










I know these Zinski images are quite a long way from my usual fare, but I did have a lovely relaxing time "colouring them in" with the Fresco paints (in the midst of some fairly frantic sample-making).

There's a lot of Cherry Red and some London Bus in the mix.










And it's either Captain Peacock or South Pacific for the button eyes - I can't quite remember now.

There's a bit of white penwork to create the polka dots on the dress, and the accents on the flowers, and some brown penwork for the doodled frames and her tiny freckles.

And that's really pretty much it.  In the end, there was only a tiny bit of music visible on the dress, so I'm really pleased I had a second tag with lots of music hovering in the air!






It's such a joy to me to hear that these new stamps are going down well, and amazing to see them already bobbing up in action around Craftyblogland.  I love seeing how they inspire other people.  Since I'm a pretty poor visitor at the moment, do feel free to give me a nudge if you've been playing with any of my word stamps - I really wouldn't want to miss any of it!

There are some more Autumn and Winter Edition samples to come, as well as one last trip into Music and Silence, but there are some other projects on the way first over the next few days so, for now, happy midweek to you, and I'll see you again soon. 

The only thing better than singing is more singing.
Ella Fitzgerald