Froggy Freedom

 

I love this cute little frog.  He seems like a sweetly wise little fella.  Kind of like a mini Radagast.  (He is a not-as-well-known wizard from Lord of the Rings.)  He sits there surrounded by nature, next to a birdcage that is mere ornamentation.  A group of blue birds reside on top of the cage.  Perhaps they have always been free?  Or perhaps our little friend helped them out...and that is why he smiles so?

I am enjoying the process of just making small bits and then letting them gather together on a pattern paper background.  This is all still a very new world to me!  But I do like splitting the creation of the individual pieces from the creation of composition.  Each process seems to use a different part of my creative brain.  Plus, the surprise discovery of the clustering is quite fun!  

Maybe I need to pick some sort of small color palette to give myself the best choice.  That butterfly is still "wowzers" yellow, and I did tone that down quite a bit.  Or maybe that is all just part of the fun?  ;o)

Supplies:

• Stamps:
• Magical Day (Hero Arts - Scrapbook.com)
• Frog
• Hat
• Mushrooms
• Birdie (BoBunny - bought at Hobby Lobby, but found a like at A Cherry on Top Crafts (?))
• Birdcage
• Birds
• Butterfly
• Ink:
• Crayola supertips - Frog, hat, mushrooms, on top of butterfly to tone down, edges of paper.
• Junesix washable ink pads (Amazon) - birdcage, birds, butterflies

• Paper - Super old 6x6 pack of pattern paper.  Not sure of name of pack (cover gone) or which big box store I purchased it from.

Process:

• Several days ago I was playing around with just stamping the Birdie set.  (That was part of "organizing" and "inventorying" my supplies.  An inky "Squirrel!")  As part of that activity, I also cut out all of the stamped images and left them (helpfully) scattered about my desk.
• I also had this very cute stamp set nearby on my desk from a recent order to Scrapbook.com.
  
  I am currently playing around with using Crayola supertips for both the original stamping and then watercoloring the stamp.  I loved how these turned out!  I did some other mushroom that did not turn out so well.  I have to be careful with how wet my brush is and I need to give a bit more time between layers/colors.
• With my frog and mushrooms done, I tried out several clustering combinations with other pieces I had on my desk.  I finally ended up with this set.  There was a lot of back and forth, problems with color clashing, etc.  Picking out the background paper definitely helped find the right combo.
• Glued down everything with a Scoth repositionable glue stick.
• Trimmed the background paper (eyeballing, but with a trimmer).
• Using more Crayola "ink", I vignetted the edges of the paper.  My dauber ended up with too much "pure" ink and created a line on the page at the bottom.  In correcting that, I "distressed" that edge a bit, but the finished piece looks just fine.
• More repositionable glue on the back, and on the wall it went!