Rise up to the occasion

I had decided to skip this weeks Stampotique designers challenge (combining animal head to human body), thought I'd concentrate on the VivaLasVegaStamps challenge in stead... but I happened to have some stamps out from a previous project, and realized I could build a lady with a butterfly head, why not? I am also posting for the Paperartsy challenge (words) and the SimonSaysStamp Monday challenge (XYZ...).

I started my project by playing with shrink plastic. I only have transluscent shrink plastic, but I wiped first with white ink, then stamped the striped legs, placed a paper to mask them of and stamped the mannequin body. I used a black pen to fill in gaps and thickened the knob at the top to the same width as the neck. 

It's always surprising how small the shrink plastic becomes...
just perfect for those wings!

I ended up adding two beads to emphasize the butterfly head.

All the used stamps are from VLVS... well, except for the peg stamps that I used for the text. Besides the challenges, I keep an eye on the DLP art journal prompts, and the prompt for this week is modelling paste, with the title "rise up to the occasion". It fit so well with the small sentiment stamp that I wanted to use, that I decided to add it too. I really liked the letter tiles on this post on the PA blog, mine are much simpler: stamped on vellum the letters stand out a bit more, which felt important because there is so much going on in the background. I took pictures of my spread along the way, here they are:

My spread had some inks on from before. I liked the right side,
but decided to cover the whole page. I started  with a layer of gesso
ensure that eventual spraying wouldn't seep through the page. 

The gesso coloured the page yellow. I collaged some sheets of
underpapers in red colours with golden embossing... lots of numbers
here, these are math test sheets! 

Sprayed with  all the reds I have: Dylusions Bubblegum pink,
Cosmic Shimmer Red firefly, added some red bister and water.

Using bleach I stamped all over the page with the writing circles
background stamp. 

Added black stamping with all the dotty, x:y and circly stamps I found...
Also the butterfly has been stamped on the left, but is barely visible.

Bleached out the butterfly... Not all of it reacted with the bleach, so
I also used white pencil and some white Sharpie to make it lighter.

Finished the background with a chevron stencil and black embossing paste.
I had planned to have a vellum butterfly, but it looked so grey I settled for the
grungy bleached out version.

The SSS Monday challenge (XYZ...) is incoorporated in the x- stamps, but also in the end of the school year, when graduating students actually do spread their wings and leave. As a high school teacher, it is always fascinating to watch them grow and leave. In the middle of all the hurry and hustle of test marking and graduation results and preparations, we got word that a student of ours has passed away after fighting an aggresive cancer for a year. I feel the image suits the sad news too, somehow it is impossible to grasp that in reality medics just can't fix everything, someone might have to leave without getting to finish the growing part at all.