Watching

Hello!  It’s hard to believe that we are 3/4 of the way through April already!!! Especially hard to believe for those of us that are still experiencing winter-like weather!  No time to mope about it, though, because we have a fun new challenge for you at the Aurora Wings Challenge Blog!!  For the next month, our theme is

The design team has some amaaaaaazing inspiration pieces for you, so be sure to check it out and get some ideas for your own work of art!!!

I decided to do a wall hanging for my project.  I used Princess of the Sea, which can be found at the AW Etsy Store here, and at Aurora Wings.com here.  I cropped the image before printing it, then carefully drew in some droplets.  I was going for the effect of a mermaid looking through a porthole….with color showing through the condensation droplets.  Although I’ve done the dew drops before, my head was having a bit of fun getting around the color in just the drops.  I messed around with 5 other of Mitzi’s mermaid images, and just could not make things work with them….my efforts actually ended up in the bin….and I NEVER throw anything out, lol.  Finally, I got the old neurons clicking in some semblance of order, and, after figuring out what color the parts behind the water would be, I colored the drops in, then proceeded to color the rest of the image in the black and white tones.

I cut the “port hole” on my Cricut, from some black shimmer paper, and some plain CS to give it depth.  I then dug through my brad bin (poor thing has been sadly neglected lately) and found a number of screw head brads to use on the port hole.  I THOUGHT I had some black and white wood grain patterned paper, but I couldn’t find it in my mess, so used a print that resembled concrete, and added lines to make it look like old ship boards.  I wanted the edges to be rough, so cut them with a few different edge scissors (talk about digging up the retro supplies, lol).  After inking the edges, I got out my dies, and some black chalk board paper (it’s darker black than the plain black CS), and plain white CS.  I cut a variety of vegetation and some fish with various dies from Frantic Stamper, Savvy Dies, and a few others that I can’t remember. I draped a piece of cheese cloth over the top, then positioned the diecuts to frame the image.  To finish off, I added some white pearls, and some clear Nuvo drop accents.  Black and white twine is used to hang this piece 🙂

After I got my head on straight, I had a ton of fun with this project!!! I really hope that you can get your black and white (and maybe a splash of color) on with us this month at the Aurora Wings Challenge Blog!!!

I’d like to enter this in the following challenges:

Classic Design Team Open Challenge – #24 ATG

A Perfect Time to Craft Open Challenge – #4 ATG

The Crafter’s Cafe – #194 World Art Day

Let’s Craft and Create – #136 ATG with option of Through a Window

The Corrosive Challenge – #4 ATG