Guest designer ARTastic Challenges

I am a guest designer over at ARTastic Challenges  this month.  The inspiration is this mixed media work titled Listen by New Zealander, Jenny Grant.  The criteria for the month was free choice, make of this what you will.

Mixed media (according to Ebay) is loosely defined as any work of art that uses more than one medium.  I loved the colours, the writing you can see peeping through and that hair effect.  I am relatively new to this mixed media application for scrapbooking and initially I was what - 'scared' to put ideas onto paper. After deciding to use a brick stencil/mask, Impasto medium and Gelato's painted on after medium had dried and then sprinkled with salt.  I played around with three variations of these until I got the background I wanted. In this case a patterned paper already with writing and flowers on it and a thick layer of Impasto medium. I wanted to match the different clothes and hair colours of us all.  

These are some of my beautiful female cousins, my sister (on right) and me (on left) - my brother was supposed to be in the photo as well but he ducked down at the last moment.  I found the quote on the internet and went to town with all the flower embellishments in my stash - paper, fabric, button, brads, rubons.  Below is a close up of the brick and Impasto background and some of the flowers.

Thank you ARTastic Challenges for challenging me once again and please head over to their blog and participate in their challenges - if not this one why not the next.