glamour and grunge

this week* at sunday postcard art the theme-- set by one of my all-time favorite collage artists, miss electra-- is GLAMOUR, so of course the challenge was calling my name! nothing says, "glamour" to me more than bollywood cinema: the costumes, the scenery, the dance numbers... hard to beat, right? there are, franky, very few NON-glamorous bollywood actresses, but aishwarya rai is arguably the most lovely of them all:

(aishwarya rai photo from an old bollywood magazine; brick digi paper from the "boys urban world" kit by 4 shades of blue; butterfly punches in various sizes: martha stewart; gems: recollections; stick-on bindi gem from butala emporium, jackson heights, ny; stamps: purple onion design, rhonna farrer for autum leaves, stampin' up; ink: colorbox; adhesives: staples brand gluetape runner, scotch gluestick, sewing machine)

for some reason, as soon as i started thinking about this theme i immediately hit on the idea of glamour and grunge, so i knew i wanted to add lots of industrial elements (i thought this was going to be a stapled collage!) plus tons of distressing. my magazine photo of aishwarya was a little too big for SPA's 4x6" format, so i made a slightly smaller copy onto photo paper. turns out my scanner is powerful enough that it picked up a little bit of the text that was on the reverse side of the page! i kind of liked how it looked, so i added to the effect with text stamps, and then flourish stamps, and... well... i might've got a tiny bit carried away, but it sure was fun!

i've been wanting to make something with a torn window ever since i ran across this gorgeous collage by erwan soyer and this seemed like the perfect time. i had to fiddle with the size of my digital brick wall paper a bit, but once i had the scale right, i loved how it looked. i always intended to have butterflies emerging from the edges, but i tried using some i punched from an old hindi newspaper, then patterned paper ones, then glossy text paper... and nothing worked. luckily, i had had to fiddle with the digital brick paper earlier on, so there were extra scraps laying around; pretty sure the brick butterflies are my favorite part!

if you love collage and inspiration, i hope you'll check out all the fabulous links in the comments of this post at sunday postcard art! meanwhile, my zine giveaway is open through next wednesday night, so i hope you'll check out this post to read all about it! meanwhile, happy memorial day weekend to all my american darlings, have fun and be safe!!!

♥♥♥ 

*ok, so, i only realized when i was adding the links... I MISSED THE DEADLINE for this challenge!  ack!  oh well, my card is made, the post is written and i had a blast doing this, so no big deal! still, many thanks to electra and sunday postcard art for the inspiration! ♥