Still no sign of Spring!

Skies are still grey; I've seen no evidence of green on the bare branches and if there weren't daffodils in the garden, I would be beginning to suspect that C. S. Lewis' White Witch had put a spell on us to make it permanent winter, but never Christmas - just as she did in Narnia! The approach of Spring (I hope!) reminded me of some cards I made a while back inspired by the idea of the mysterious, 'Green Man' who makes his appearance in lots of church carvings. I have made some altered books in the past, so I used old William Morris calender pages, vintage pages from a fairy tale book and also created a little papier-mache face 'breaking out of the page'. These photos are taken with my old camera so they are not brilliant representations - apologies! The stamps I used are Lynne Perrella's @Paper Artsy collection and I embellised with coloured eyelets and sequin leaves.

 Of course the masks made sending these Spring cards through the post tricky! I had to put them in boxes and send them as little packages to friends with Spring birthdays.

In this one I used a different colour scheme and tried to create the impression of a stone garden ornament surrounded by leaves. The tags peeping out of the card were used to write a greeting and they were decorated with Paper Artsy images from 'Ink and the Dog' 'Wings' (my personal favourite) and 'At Home' sheets. I wanted to create the impression of twilight too with those lengthening Spring evenings, so I added some small blue and silver twinkling stars just making their appearance.

This is a slightly closer view of the sculpted face. I became quite obsessed with making these faces!

Eventually I just had to create an art doll canvas with one. Again I tried to create the impression of an altered page becoming 3D, which was inspired by an altered book I once saw on Sandra Evertson's blog. It is difficult to show this, but under the mask there is a Lynne Perrella phrenology

style head stamp; there are little 'grunge' hinges at the side that can't be seen in the photo and the crown on the doll's head is also from a Paper Artsy Lynne Perrella sheet. Her bodice is a Paper Artsy heart and the skirts are torn from fairy tale pages. Her jointed arms move and she holds her mask on a cocktail stick with a narrow ribbon bow. The wren on the left is an image from the fairy tale book coloured in with water colour pencils. The butterflies are from a Stampington 'Clearly Impressed' sheet called 'Butterfly Girl'. Ideally I like to combine my own art work with collage elements and the work of rubber stamp artists like Lynne Perrella and to explore themes like The Seasons in this way. I look forward to sharing some more recent projects in my next post by which time I hope blogging will be feeling a little more natural to me - and the photos will be of a better quality!