Je rêvais enfant de vivre libre...

No, I don't actually speak French.

But after the insanity that was my summer, I have definitely been dreaming of freedom.  Or maybe just free time.  And once I had some, I squandered what I had.  But no more!  Even as the semester begins again, I'm afire with artistic desire.  And inspired by some pretty awesome artists.

See, thanks to my gentleman, I've gotten hooked on the musical Notre Dame de Paris, and thanks to that I've gotten hooked on Garou, the Canadian singer who starred as Quasimodo.  And thus I was inspired, quite insistently, by this song:


(Decent translation here.  I think.  You should watch this one, too, if you have the time:  Au plaisir de ton corps It's more upbeat and... ok I'll stop, this post is not about Garou....)

I've always loved the idea of gypsies, mostly the sort of bohemian style we associate with them.  So this song "Gitan" kept poking at me.  "Poke, poke, HEY when are you going to do some ART about me?" Okay, okay.  I gave in.  I started (appropriately) with a stripey 7 Gypsies paper, and inked some blue onto it a la Tim Holtz.  Over that, I stamped and embossed a couple of my favorite Michelle Ward stamps with clear ink and powder.  Shiny:


From there I added a layer of orange ink, which of course the clear embossing resisted:



(Working with this color combination was a leap of faith for me...)

So the background was done. Now to build it up, right? First thing I reached for was the new tape from Tim Holtz.

(Oops, that one came out blurry. Sorry.)

So then, to go with the urban gypsy theme, I needed something to indicate freedom. This is the "vivre libre" after all. Wings! Wings indicate freedom. I'll do wings. I'll do wings on grungeboard and affix them to the thingie so it'll have some depth. Oops, grungeboard fail. Oh well, maybe I'll just emboss them. I think I'm destined to work in two dimensions. Here we go, embossing wingalings:


Oops. Embossing semi-fail.

Does anybody have any idea WHY on the black stripes the embossing powder stuck to the ink, but not anywhere else? WTF? Oh well, just looks grungier, right...?

Well now it needs a rockstar touch. Rockstar. Stars! I've got stars.


It was at this point that I started spending way too much time fiddling around trying to figure out what else to stick on this thing. It rejected many of my ideas. What I ended up with was this:


I still wasn't sure whether it was finished, but I asked for some expert advice and was assured that this is the finished piece (you know who you are - thank you for your help!):


All it needs now is a home. I haven't decided yet what to do with it, whether to mount it on something or to frame it or what. But for now I'm just going to enjoy it.

P.S. You might notice I fiddled with the blog appearance.  It was time for an update... What do you think?