Sailing Life's Oceans

This month, the Being Creative Group theme was 'Ocean'.  True to form and what is quickly becoming 'the norm' for me, I had lots of ideas throughout the month but only sat down to do anything about it this weekend.  And so, yet again, I have only one piece to show.  

I decided I would settle for the sailing boat in the ocean idea.  I had, what I thought was the positively genius idea of using an old atlas page showing an ocean.  Leafing through my old atlas I found that the page I liked best was showing three oceans: the Atlantic, the Indian and the Southern Oceans.  Although my atlas is very old and was a hand-me-down from many years ago,  as it was the only  atlas I possess, I decided I would photocopy the page rather than actually tear it from the book.  I stuck the copy to a piece of cardboard for rigidity.

So far so good.  I felt it needed jazzing up a bit as it looked exactly what it was: a page from an atlas!  So I decided I would try out my new stash of distress inks.  I chose Broken China (blue) and Dusty Concord (mauve) and used a square of Cut 'n' Dry Foam to rub the ink over the paper ... 

gradually building up the colour until I liked what I saw.

I confess I got carried away doing this: it was so hypnotic making circular movements over the page.  It then struck me that a single sailing boat would be more effective than the fleet I had at first imagined, and the title 'Sailing Life's Oceans' just popped into my head and resonated deeply; I just knew that was the way forward.  And so, I drew a little sailing boat on thin card, cut it out, and placed it on the canvas.  Deep satisfaction; this was the way forward.  I wanted the boat to be really bright, a brilliant white, something like...like a ceramic tile.  Hmm, how on earth could I do that?  My mind wandered to the recently bought pot of Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel.  Would this work?  Worth a try, so I found the pot, the embossing ink pad, my heat gun and a pair of tweezers (I didn't want to scorch my fingers) and settled down to the task in hand.  And what a task it was!  If I tell you that the boat is less than an inch in size overall, and I had three sections to emboss, one at a time, you can perhaps imagine just how fiddly this was.  But I did it!  Patience and perseverance won the day.

And so I give you the end result... 

Sailing Life's Oceans

and the boat in close-up... 

I so thoroughly enjoyed making this and LOVE my little 'ceramic' boat.

This all came together so quickly and well.  Mr C loves it (and if you know Mr C and his shortcomings when it comes to art appreciation, you will know that that is praise indeed!) and has asked where I intend hanging it.  What better compliment can there be?