Here's My Heart!

A few months ago while surfing Etsy I came across a shop that I totally fell in love with. Altered Artifacts has an amazing shop. She creates collage sheets of vintage images and ephemera for artists to use in their artwork. I am also following her blog. Inka has a great shop, great blog and is a really nice person!

I volunteered to create some pieces using one of her new collage sheets. The theme of the collage sheet I was given to work with is called "Here's My Heart"

I am not a heart person. Never have been. So this was challenging for me to work with. That's a good thing because it made me work harder. Even though Inka said no deadline I put a self imposed one on me because I know what a procrastinator I can be.

The piece is called " I will love you forever". Back in August I attended a three day creative conference in Chicago. One of the classes was all about creating backgrounds using medias I had never played with before. I left the workshop with 10 6 x 6 canvas panels with some pretty interesting textures and layers on them. The background for this piece is one of those panels. It has layers of paper ephemera collaged over paint and then textured with bubble wrap and lace and this new product from Krylon called spray gesso (great stuff by the way!) The three cherubs are images from Altered Artifacts. The rest of the items in the collage were all found in the studio. The white rose and two butterflies are stickers, the stars and the large cherub at the bottom left of the collage are rubber stamps I had on hand. using StazOn Ink Pad in brown ( this too a wonderful product for rubber stamping on just about anything). In the upper right corner is a portion of a gold foil doily with a resin 3-D face.

The second piece I made for Altered Artifacts is an ATC (artist trading card) called "Be Mine"  The background for this ATC I made using a Distress Ink Pad by Tim Holz. These stamp pads give you a great grunge look. I  generally use these inks by rubbing it over the blank ATC card. in the upper right corner I used a calligraphic line stamp and then placed a pink flower made out of acrylic jewels. The two cherubs were cut from one the vintage valentines on the Altered Artifacts collage sheet. I covered over the hearts these two little darlings were holding with faceted red acrylic jewel hearts. Unfortunately my photo doesn't pick up the brilliance of these little gems.