21 cards - #13

Hello friends.  I'm still working on the monthly challenge at Motley Soul Mixed-Media Art.

Please refer to this post to see how I made the base for my cards.

Since it's been working so well, I used my Inspiration Jar again.  My words this time: hexagons, birds, and fabric.  All things I love, so I didn't think I have too much trouble with this one.  I started by grabbing the first fabric I saw.  I glued some to a piece of cereal box chipboard with matte Mod Podge and let it dry.  Then I die cut a couple of hexagons with a Sizzix die.  I cut two different sizes and decided the smaller one would be better.  I also punched out a circle from the chipboard, glued on the fabric and then trimmed around the circle.  My punch won't punch through the fabric, but it was the size I wanted.  The tail feathers and beak are cut from some extra pieces of the fabric covered chipboard.  The legs and feet are black card stock.

So now that I had all the pieces of the bird, I needed a background.  And... I was stuck!  What to do?  I finally decided to use some acrylic paint.  I painted part of the background an olive green, but wasn't happy with that, so I added some blue - still not happy.  I went through a transition with yellow, peach and red, with some of the earlier colors showing through.  I liked how the red brightened up the background, but it was really too bright for the bird to stand out.  So... I grabbed my jar of watered down Gesso and brushed it over the entire background.  It was better immediately.  I like how the coating of Gesso brought out the texture from the coffee filter. 

So I let that dry, attached the bird (since I didn't want to lose any of the pieces), and guess what?  I was stuck... again!

Since I was teaching a couple of classes today, I had to let it sit and get all set up for those.  By the time I finished, I was ready for bed, so I didn't get to work on this again until late in the afternoon after my classes were all finished.  Eventually, I decided to stamp some Tim Holtz stamps from Nature's Moments in jet black archival ink.  I realized that I really should have done the stamping before I attached the bird, but it was too late, so this was just going to have to work.  Do you like my attitude?

I went searching my files for a saying to put on.  When I came across this one, I knew it was what I wanted to use, so I printed it, cut it apart and glued it on.  Done!  I like it.

Thank you so much for spending time with me today.