International Art and Soul Challenge 121

 The challenge for this fortnight was chosen by my team mate Sall, and she wants projects on the theme of Remembrance. 

That's a very appropriate theme for this time of year, but I found it hard to come up with a project that I could actually use. It's not normal to send cards for Remembrance day, and while people wear poppies, making your own kind of defeats the purpose of poppies as a way of making money for the Royal British Legion. So, my project has poppies, but no specific mention of Remembrance, beyond the fact that sending someone a card is a sign that you're thinking about them.

I started with Claritystamp stamps. The image and text are from the beautiful Art Deco range, and have the added benefit (from my point of view) of being stained glass style, so they represent two of my favourite styles immediately.

I stamped the image with Versafine Clair, then coloured with Promarkers, although the very narrow borders were coloured with water-based fine liner pens. I simply cannot get Promarkers to behave in that sort of very narrow space. I know they used to supply fine tips for the pens and these were great, but quickly became clogged and unusuable. It's such a pity they couldn't make those work.

The background started with Distress Ink applied to white card. My thinking was a kind of 'out of focus' poppy field, but I'm not sure how well that worked out. I took the result and embossed it with an Embossalicious folder. Then, I used black Distress Ink to pick out the raised areas.

I matted the image on red and then black card, and the background on black, and that's it. I considered adding something (like some poppies) but decided it worked well enough without.

I do hope you can join us this time.