Odd Couplings: Textured Vintage

Part of my creative makeup is to couple odd things. Well, actually, things that are generally considered by others to be odd, because apparently I do not think they are odd. :-))

 Here, in the photo above, are the unlikely components of a recent artventure. My task was to create a birthday card for my longtime art swap friend, Kim, whose main genre is vintage, but she also has a bit of a rebel side, too. So my Muse immediately took advantage of this, whispering to me to make something vintage as a nonconformist would.

 I've been trying hard to be more intuitive: listen to my initial creative ideas and go with them. My first reactive ideas to what my Muse threw down: create a little work of art on a card, and make it textural. I should also add that I had just received the image of that lovely young lady from my friend Trish Bee, and I'd left it on my desk to file away later. But that stare cast a spell, so I combined it with a few images from an Alpha Stamps collage sheet.

I also had just finished watercoloring a wavy-cut piece of watercolor paper that had been rak'd to me years ago and had sat patiently in my little miscellaneous papers bin, waiting for me. As I have often said, I seem to only be able to watercolor stripes, and this must be proof of that, lol. I was actually trying out colors I do not normally "see" on the palette, as was suggested somewhere from my blog reading a while back. Not all the colors ended up being perfect matches to the images, but enough of them were, and that caused me to see this as a sign to make my stripes the background here.

Also in my mind I was wanting to replicate the ribbed lace effect of the girl's dress. I soon concluded that I had no materials that would literally replicate it, but I might go for the effect of it. As in, reminds you of... I went to my window racks of ribbon and my eyes kept resting on the purple ribbon. Again, the ribbon is not exactly, but reminds you of... I really like that the white edging on it mimics the white line across the dress bodice. And it blended beautifully with the purple in the background.

The finishing touches were the Prima flowers and the base mat of the card. I tried to choose 3 colors that were in both the images and the striped background. I chose the rose pink, the light blue, and the grayish brown. I chose a large and small flower in each color, then coupled them. For the mat, I chose a scrap sheet of card stock that looks at times dark purple and at times dull grayish brown. And it has tiny stripes in it. If that didn't scream, use me!, I don't know what would.