Love, Friends and Flying with the Paper Dolls

Hello all, and welcome.  Thank you so much for your lovely comments on my Neutral Zone tag - they made me very happy.  Today we're back into a more colourful world - the colour-coded samples I created for my three new stamp sets launched with PaperArtsy back in February.  You've already seen the "red collection" for EAB09 The Love Edition, along with the samples for all three sets created with the Zinski characters in Love, Friends and Flying with the Zinskis.  Today I'm here with a snapshot of the "green collection" for EAB10 Friends & Friendship...

I love them all laid out together like that.  It reminds me of the fun I had putting them all together.  For the remainder of this post, we'll take a closer look at how the Idea-ology Paper Dolls fall in love, make friends and take flight!

I love combining these quotations with the Paper Dolls - as I'm playing, they quite often "speak" to me, and let me know the kinds of things they want to say.  So in each of my colour-coded collections, there had to be some Paper Dolls.













In fact, this first tag was the one which kicked off the whole shebang as far as these samples went.  Leandra needed something eye-catching early on, just one project, and I thought that a nice vivid red heart would be striking, and would also capture the essence of The Love Edition stamp set in one go.












But it was a tight deadline and, if I'm creating in a hurry, then vintage neutrals are my go-to choice.  I combined the two ideas - the red heart, the vintage neutrals - and off we went...

I used some Tim Holtz paper in the background and to create the collage strips and panels.












And what could be better than a wedding as simple shorthand to get the idea behind the love-themed stamp set across.  So choosing these two as the focal point was a no-brainer.












The Thoreau quote is stamped and embossed in Wow Earthtone Pepper - the perfect colour to tone with the beige-greys of the papers, while giving that extra touch of texture.











Once I'd created that tag, I knew I could create the rest of the samples with neutrals too, making my life easier in my comfort zone.  But I didn't want to be stuck with red for absolutely all of them (it's not a colour I find very easy).

I suddenly realised I could stick with my neutrals but shift my accent colour for each stamp set, making it easy to see which quotes came from which sets.  Perfect!  











And because I already had this wonderful Coleridge quote floating in my head, it was pretty clear that green would be the Friends & Friendship colour.














The mother and daughter friendship pairs are sheltering beneath the lovely tree from the Urban Snapshots Nature 1 set, embossed in black over a sponged background of Granny Smith and Magic Moss Fresco paints.













I love the texture you can get with a natural sponge, and it's so easy to do.

The quote itself is very simply stamped in black, to match the tree and the washi tape "ground" they are all standing on.










A little metal accent, and some off-white seam binding - to match the ribbon on the wedding tag - and we're done.















This fabulous flapper pair are on a tag made in exactly the same way as the wedding tag was.  Some TH design paper as background and collage elements...















... and then the other matching elements to tie things together across the collections - the Idea-ology token, the white ribbon, the tangled thread...













... and of course the quote, embossed in Earthtone Pepper again.  Plautus may have been writing two hundred years B.C., but he knew what he was talking about!












These two get some extra greenery in the shape of some die-cut wildflower stems.  The card they're cut from was painted with the same Granny Smith and Magic Moss combination - and it's the same stuff the quote is matted onto as well.












Finally, we head to EAB11 Wings & Flight.  And you'll remember that we're taking flight into the wild blue yonder... otherwise known as the Smurf and China Fresco paint colours.

(You'll get a shot of the whole "blue collection" in the next samples post, whenever I manage to get that written!)












Here I used pretty much the tiniest of the Paper Dolls to create a pair of ATCs, using the same method as for two of the tags above...














Tim's paper again forms the background as well as some (very small) strips and panels of collaging.  














Rather than die-cutting, the little bird and the butterfly are done with the TH punches, out of card painted with a combination of the two blue paints.














These two quotes are the shortest on the plate, so they work beautifully for smaller projects.














But they're not small thoughts, far from it...  In fact, they are huge ideas, full of longing and dreams.








That's one of the things I love about language, that in just a few short words you can open up the mind to whole universes.  That's why words so often inspire me to create visually, I think - to explore the ideas they trigger in me.  It really is about "words and pictures" feeding one another.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing these samples in a little more detail.  There's one more batch to come but, before that appears, I've got something new for you using some words from one of these new sets.  I hope to be back with that some time this weekend.

In the meantime, thank you so much for stopping by, and I hope you have a lovely rest-of-the-week.  See you again soon!

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
George Gordon, Lord Byron

By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.
Jean Baptiste Girard