Bargain Background!

A second humorous tag for the May Prompt on Country View Challenges: Be Humorous.  I was playing with a bargain find from a second hand book store creating a background, and the tag developed from there.

I had been out for the Bank Holiday, looking round a local(ish) place: Dagfields Crafts and Antiques.  I got chatting to the gentleman who runs a large second hand book shop there and asked if he had any old cheap books or manuscripts that I could use for crafting. He went and rummaged through some shelves and came up with a book of Beethoven Sonatas which he sold me for the princely amount of £2.

On my arrival home, I couldn't wait to start making a background using less than half a page of the book!  I tore strips of music manuscript, added them to a #8 manilla tag; sealing with matte gel medium, drying and trimming.

As they were Beethoven Sonatas, I decided to fill in the gaps with strips torn out of an old German English dictionary which I no longer use.  They were added in the same way as the music.  If you look closely, you will see that 'Musik' is one of the words used from the dictionary.

A wash with watered down white gesso.

Followed by watered down Cloudy Blue Adirondack paint.

As the background involved music, I chose the singing Robins stamp (from the Christmas Carol 2 set by Claritystamp) to create the focal image.  First the image was stamped directly onto the tag using Jet Black Archival ink.  I created a branch by adding in a second line and colouring with a couple of Faber Castell Big Brush markers.

I also stamped the birds again onto a piece of Sheena's stamping card using Onyx Black Versafine ink and heat embossed them with clear EP.  They were coloured with Kuretake Clean Colour pens, then the three birds were fussy cut and added to the tag.  Once sealed with Distress Glaze and dry, a Big Brush marker was used to add shading around the birds and below the branch.

The next step was to add further colour around the edges of the tag using the Cerulean Blue (Phthalo) Van Gogh Oil Pastel from Royal Talens.

I had originally planned to add a quote about birds singing, but instead opted for one of the Dyan Reaveley humorous quotes from the Say It How It Is stamp set.  The quote was stamped onto separate card and heat embossed in the same way as the birds.  Once fussy cut, the quote boxes were added to the tag.

It only remained to add shading around the quote boxes in the same way as around the birds earlier, using a Big Brush marker.