RanaLea Designs: wall art

Okay, so I got to rummaging the other day, and I found a cross-stitch that my mom did for me when I turned 21. Very cute, it's hanging in my craft room now. But, it was in this large, flat gold box. Like this:

Not a terribly pretty box...

So, I decided to take this box and do something with it. Partly because I want new wall art, and partly to see if I could. And because I love some of the pieces my friend Jessie over at Points for Creativity has been doing with various surfaces, scrap-booking papers, and Mod Podge. I painted the box black (I have some of Plaid's FolkArt pigment paints. Man is that stuff thick! Perfect for a thing like this...) and started selecting papers. Then I remembered the 1001 copies of Macbeth I own... Okay, not really that many, but I have 4 or 5, at least. Because I am an English teacher, and we do things like that. So, as we're nearing the Halloween-ie season, which always makes me think oddly enough of the Macbeth witches, because they are the quintessential Halloween witch / hag. Plus, I've recently discovered I can draw a rather rudimentary bird, so I decided to use those, too!

And, at Dollar Tree last week, I found these rather hideous shadow-box frames that proclaimed, loudly and often "It's a Boy." So, of course, I had to do something with those. Here's the original, sort of:

Gotta love the Dollar Tree!

Hideous, yes? Anyways, I sanded those down, and painted them black, as well.

So, after the paint finally dried (I hate waiting for paint to dry. and glue... anything that must dry, really...) I pulled out the old Macbeth and ripped out all the witchy pages (well, except for the ones I had written on while I read the play for class. yeah, it was that copy...) Then, I sketched out a biggish bird, and Mod Podged the opening scene onto him. Here he is drying:

After I arranged the scrapbook papers to my liking, I took a pic to remember:

Rough draft!

Then I pulled out the Mod Podge! Cuz, you know, Mod Podge really does rock! Note to self--vellum does not like Mod Podge at all. It was all sorts of bubbly, and there was NOTHING my brand new brayer (yay! I finally got a brayer!!!) could do to fix it. So I switched out the other vellum pieces I'd been planning on using. Then, of course, it had to dry! Joy!

Then I remembered the little frames! And I thought they would look awfully nice with something to go with the big piece. So I rummaged in my papers again, and found a few more to match the big piece, cut out two smaller birds, and Mod Podged more bits of the play on them. Once they all dried, I put everything together!

So here's the finished project: