Dragons' Dream TIO - Brown and the letter H.

Hello and a special welcome to my followers. Many thanks to the three ladies who have just started following Magpieheaven: it's lovely to have you drop by. I think I say this every fortnight; but time seems to fly by and that special Dragon Dreaming Wednesday is here again! This time it's the turn of the very talented and creative, May to choose the recipe and she has come up with 'Brown' and the letter 'H'. If you take a trip over to the Dragons' Dream TIO here, you can see the superb interpretations the Dragon Design Team came up with. Do please join us, if you can. All you have to do is to create a tag using brown and featuring the letter 'h'. Remember - as always - to use one real stamped image and then just let your imagination take flight. I've always loved the warm range of browns that can be found in sun-baked bricks and this is what inspired my tag this time.

I began by pushing some Grunge Paste through a Crafters' Workshop stencil to create my 'brick wall'. Down in the left-hand corner I used the same technique with a beautiful, Lin Brown poppy head stencil. When the stencilling was all dry, I painted the whole tag with some PaperArtsy Fresco Finish in Nougat. I then blended Chocolate Pudding, Toffee and Caramel Frescos onto the tag, leaving the centre as light as possible, as I planned to stamp my focal image there.

After stamping my focal image in Onyx Black Versafine, I used Yellow Submarine Fresco to highlight it. This Lynne Perrella image has always intrigued me. I love the idea of the lady with a tower as her hat and the combination of  stone and drapery. On my tag, I wanted to create the impression of her seeming to step out from her sunny wall. Years ago I was captivated by Jean Cocteau's black and white film of 'Beauty and the Beast', which I believe influenced the Disney version. In Cocteau's movie, garden statues come alive; stone hands appear from within walls, holding torches to guide Beauty through the Beast's castle and smoke billows through the nostrils of the stone faces around an ornate mantel-piece!  My brick-wall lady's face is highlighted with Inktense pencil. I touched some of the bricks with a little Florentine Treasure Gold too. The 'H' in the top right hand corner is edged with gold UTEE and embossed with copper embossing enamel.

The sentiment is from an Ink and the Dog Pierrot plate by PaperArtsy. I also used a PaperArtsy mini with tiny letter 'H's. I added some stencilling in Orange Blossom and Potting Soil Archival of extra bricks.

The seam-binding was dyed with avocado skins and then stamped with some of the Mini Script. Avocado skins make a lovely brown shade, which you can see in the lace edging the tag too.

Thank you so much for stopping by Magpieheaven today. I do hope it's sunny and warm wherever you are, but that you will be tempted indoors to play in your craft rooms and studios for this challenge. Have a great week!