A Gift for a Friend - Rubber Dance Challenge!

Welcome to Magpieheaven! Lately the sun has been shining in a sky of cloudless, powder blue; the blossoms are budding on our apple tree and the sun has been creating dusky shadows on the garden path. The colours of the current Rubber Dance Challenge - Pink, Powder Blue and Dusky Grey are all around! It feels like Summer - for how long I'm not sure! I decided it was time to join in with the Rubber Dance Challenge, as I love their stamps and the blog is so full of inspiration! Just check it out here! I recently gifted a decorated jumbo peg to one of my followers to celebrate 2 years of blogging and, as I needed to make a birthday gift for a family friend, I decided to try to use the Rubber Dance colour palette for a new peg doll.

I make these double-sided memo dolls from plain wooden jumbo pegs, so I've tried to incorporate the Rose, Powder Blue and Dusky Grey n both sides. I used stencils - a Rebekah Meier doily and a Harlequin pattern and PaperArtsy Fresco paints in Oyster Blue, Antarctic, Slate and Blush. Leandra @ PaperArtsy has a great video on the 'bumping' technique here, which helps to create a 3D impression.

So that I could use my favourite rubber stamps on this project, I miniaturised them by stamping them onto Shrink Plastic. I painted the plastic with a wash of PaperArtsy Guacamole, allowed it to dry and then stamped with the star from Sara Nauman's  most recent design for PaperArtsy, and this lovely sentiment from Rubber Dance, before carefully cutting both of these out and then shrinking them with a heat tool - I just love doing that. Our friend is a lover of all kinds of music and  has spent many happy evenings sitting on our living room floor listening with us to anything from Reggae to Vaughan-Williams!

I used my own artwork on the doll's face/s. The white musical notes on her hat are stamped using a Rubber Dance background stamp and some Snowflake Fresco paint. For texture, I used some Grunge Paste tinted with Fresco paints in Banana and Chocolate pudding and a little lace fixed with gell medium and touched with Treasure Gold.

Here is the reverse side of my doll: a sleeping pierrot. Again I used Shrink Plastic to reduce this PaperArtsy Mini stamp to fit my peg doll exactly: it reads 'Imagination rules the world'. The bird is part of a Stencil Girl stencil - a very large one, in fact, of birds in a wood! Again I used the Grunge Paste to create texture on the hair.

I added a little Treasure Gold to accentuate the texture and I utilised the blue, pink and grey colour palette within the head part of the peg. The side of the peg, I decorated with spots of sunshine yellow with some Sapphire Treasure Gold on the metal of the peg.

 Our friend is a great fan of the art of Cecil Collins who created naive and beautiful paintings of pierrot type figures - wise fools! This one is called The Sleeping Fool.

I wanted to try to evoke something of Collins' simplicity and serenity in this little gift, which comes with much love to our dear friend. Thank You so much for dropping by Magpieheaven today and taking a look at my peg doll, which I should like to link up to The Rubber Dance Blog April Colour Challenge here.