New challenge at Lasting Memories and more

 
 


Its time for a new challenge over at Lasting Memories!!!  This weeks challenge is the first one of May - which has a theme of "Life affirmations". This weeks theme is gratitude - someone or something you are grateful for.... When I think of being grateful three main people come to mind, a friend (who I dont have any photos of at present), my fiance and my sister.

As I was still feeling very inspired by some other challenges this month (even though I have already entered) I decided to go back to my sea themes from Scrap around the world this month and use this photo.

When this photo was taken I was a widow with three children under three. I was having a very tough time with the kids and no help. It was almost impossible to maintain friendships as we couldnt visit anyone and the kids required so much supervision I didnt ever get a chance to stop and chat. My sister at the time lived up in Cairns and was working at a Barrier reef tour operator as a scuba dive instructor (If you are ever in Cairns dont miss the "Passions of Paradise"). We decided to head up and visit and she offered us a free trip out on the reef on the boat. Then she also looked after the kids so that I could go snorkelling and scuba diving. It was an amazing trip, the highlight of a really tough few years.We took this picture with the underwater camera....

I started with a sketch from Cest Magnifique this month, flipped it to suit my treasure chest and made the mixed media background in the shape from the sketch background. I used the treasure chest and sea elements instead of the flowers and watch.

I just couldnt quite get this layout to photograph well.... so Im adding a lot of detail shots! I had a lot of fun with this one. I tried out the technique of melding the photo into the background for the first time and went nuts with pen and pencil shading, tracing and adding texture - I was very inspired by the technique challenge over at Scrap Africa this month to use pencil on your layout. Even though I had already entered once I still had some ideas left! I started by drawing this treasure chest and shading in some shadows. I then traced and shaded many of my design elements with a black pen i.e seashells to give them more texture and traced circles from a stencil with black pen too.