Dressed to the Nines

Okay, I said this week's art wasn't going to be all about collage so I played with paint today as well.

Started with this page in a book I call my "Leftover Journal" - every time I have paint or spray or what have you left over, I add it to a page in this book.  So I already had a bit of a background in place when I started today's art making.

I stuck my hand in my "images" box without looking and pulled out this lady in a frame (from a free collage sheet provided by Retro Cafe Art Gallery).

I opened a magazine to a random page and found these three ladies, two of whom lost their heads when I ripped out the page.  I ended up using just the body of the one on the right and reattaching the head of the middle lady so I could use her on my journal page.

Ha ha! I see the placemat underneath this photo
makes it look like the middle lady has a paper
bag over her face!

I thought I was being quite clever when I sliced an opening at the bottom of the lady's photo to slide the red dress in under the frame - pat on the back to me for that idea!  I then smudged several colours of paint (green, gold and red, to coordinate with the colours in the border of the framed lady) around the border of the page to unify things (thank you, Judy Wise, for that idea!) as well as painting over a stencil in the middle area, both with a brush and with a paint dabber. The stenciled image isn't quite as clear as I might have liked - I wanted to have the number nine there because of the caption "dressed to the nines" - but I can live with it.  I thought I was done but then I decided to doodle a little frame around the picture on the left, to balance it with the larger, heavier frame around the woman on the right.  Here is my finished page: