Show Your Face Masquerade!

Hello and Welcome to Magpieheaven! Today I should like to link up with Kim Dellow's fabulous 'Show your Face' blog spot here, which has become a regular Friday adventure for me! Each Friday Kim invites us to share any portrait art that we've been playing with over the week. She inspires us with a face she is working on herself and we make faces of our own, if you know what I mean, whether it be in a journal; a sketch or a doodle; an experiment with new materials or fun with old techniques. As long as the face itself is our own creation, we can add anything we like in the way of stamping, stencils, embossing or embellishment. This Friday I decided to develop a sketch I did a week or two back, printing it onto a different surface and adding a little costume. Here is my original sketch, which I drew using Portfolio Pastels onto a page in a vintage book of old sayings before scanning it into my computer.

I have used her once for a tag on the theme of circles and the colour purple...

You might remember that she was trying to decide between settling for the simple life or trying something she had never done before? Well, on this project, it looks as if she paid a visit to the Costume boutique and chose a fancy dress for a very special summer costume ball! Could that have been something she was contemplating that she never tried before?

I wonder if the costume with its red pig-tail wig and carnival theme helped her to find a new identity for the evening and to fly a little with those butterfly wings?

The portrait was printed onto fabric and a little extra colour, mixed with PaperArtsy Satin Glaze was added. Her ruff is a Rebekkah Meier stencil on fabric with a lace trim, fixed with heavy gel medium and touched with Treasure Gold. I used some embroidery stitching and hemming along with the heavy gel medium to collage everything onto my journal cover, which was just £3.00 from the Scandinavian chain, Tiger.

This project was a very different way to use the lovely new PaperArtsy Hot Picks stamps I played with for the first time recently. Here I've used the wings and part of the sentiment on fabric painted with Frescos - Antarctic and Smurf, embossing the edges with gold UTEE. The wing is also from HP1506, stamped onto tissue, which I attached to fabric coloured with Frescos and Fabric Medium and edged with gold UTEE again.

The sketch book was made from a kind of black canvas, which I brayered with Frescos in Smurf, Antarctic and Southern Skies and then stencilled over in Hey Pesto with a Stencil Girl stencil of birds in a wood. I then stamped this beautiful Sara Nauman script over the top, using Fresco Antarctic.

Now my journal cover is complete and the little masquerader is all ready for her party, or is she returning home through an enchanted wood just before day-break? What faces have you been creating this week? I am really looking forward to seeing what Kim and the other contributors have created and I hope that if you haven't done so before, you'll link up a face to Kim's blog too.