A Dragon Glow!

Hello and Welcome, friends and followers! This week at The Dragons' Dream, the very creative Gabrielle has chosen the recipe of the letter 'G' and 'Birds'. Please click here and take a look at her tag - I love those quirky little birds, and the other tags created by the Design Team are miniature masterpieces every one! My tag was inspired by a wonderful wildlife photography exhibition at London's Natural History Museum. I spent a very enjoyable morning there with an old friend last week. The photos were vibrant, portraying the birds and animals as part of their beautiful habitats. There is a note of sadness about the exhibition, though: many of the creatures in the photos are endangered and so many unique and lovely parts of our world are being destroyed through thoughtlessness and greed. I wanted to create a tag that would celebrate this incredible planet we live on and remind me not to take for granted all the beauty around me.

I used a combination of three or four different stamp plates for my tag, so the Magpie's Nest was in a muddle for a while! I did enjoy mixing and matching stamps.

One of the most glorious spectacles the world has to offer is a sunset. For this tag, I decided to step outside my comfort zone and use some colours that I have not really played with much before, but which evoked a fiery sunset. I took a Jumbo tag, painted with some Nougat, which is an opaque Fresco Finish and makes a good base and then took translucent Frescos in Autumn Fire, Yellow Submarine and Tango, watered them down and then swiped my tag across the watery blobs on my craft mat. I heated the tag to dry it and used misters to spritz my tag until I liked the background I had created. I had decided that my letter would spell 'Glow' and that is what I wanted my tag to do!

I kept adding layers of translucents with a sponge and, although my marbled effect was less apparent, it was still visible. I then edged my tag with some dry-brushed London Bus and French Roast. I have some Crafty Individuals stamps of trees with tiny birds gathering in their branches, so I decided to showcase these lovely images on this tag. I stamped them with Onyx Black Versafine onto card sponged with Yellow Submarine and Autumn Fire and then sprinkled them with clear UTEE and heated. I wanted the black to really gleam against the fiery background. The little sun is from a Paper Artsy, Lynne Perrella plate.

I stamped with some script from Paper Artsy Hot Picks and used my Tim Holtz Worn Alphabet with Black Archival on some more of the card I had painted. I edged my tag with Gold UTEE.

The little birds in the grass are from a Hot Picks plate, stamped onto the tag in Wendy Vecchi Fern Green Archival and then clear embossed. You may just be able to see that I added a hint of Hey Pesto to this area of the tag. I had thought of edging my tag with black lace, but I wanted to keep the bold black contrasts that echo the tree silhouettes so I stamped the Lynne Perrella banners onto what remained of my card and added these as a trim. Some tiny punched out leaves, accented in Treasure Gold complete the tag,which I finished off with seam binding dyed with Fired Brick, Walnut Stain and Aged Mahogany distress inks.

 I do hope you like my take on 'Birds' in  the 'Glow' of sunset. Have a great day wherever you are. Perhaps this evening you'll see a stunning sunset and a sky filled with throngs of birds. All we have to do sometimes is look up.