Time Travels in a Box - SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges Mid-Month Reminder

Servus and welcome to my little creative spot!
It's time for our mid-month reminder post over at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges!

Those who know me a bit, also know that I looooove found objects. Beautifully aged and timeworn bits and pieces that would tell stories from the past if they could only speak. And I love assemblage art!

Assemblage art originates from the late 1800s, when sculptor Auguste Rodin already started to use casts made of his already finished pieces to combine these parts to form new pieces of art.
Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp did assemblages too and now there are a lot of contemporary artists who create wonderful assemblage art. And I especially love the magical art of Joseph Cornell!!!

For today's project I wanted to create a piece of assemblage art that consisted of found objects that could "speak for themselves" (instead of having to be altered or done over with special media to make them more appealing).

I decided to use a beautiful little black box that I was recently given to by dear friends (who keep the good lookin' emptied boxes for me - which makes me a really lucky person to have such thoughtful and caring friends!) and some of my long hoarded treasures alongside a few bought embellishments to create this time travel box...

The guy in the blue jumper was a collectible pin from a series that came with the Julius Meinl Coffee tins back when my grandma and grandaunts were young girls.  I have an old tin with some more and an old diablo game that belonged to one of my grandaunts. But what good are these treasures if you don't put them out there so they can be looked at?

So I decided it was time to shine some light on some of these old originals (like the pin, the threaded and other vintage buttons, the watchmakers tools in the little corked glass vial, the rusted spring and ring and the frozen charlotte) alongside some embellishments from Prima and the idea-ology range.

The background and also cover of my box show my great-grandmother's passport!

I made colour copies and sealed them with matte Decou-Page. I also used the Decou-Page to fix all the items to the box.

Now I have some of my beloved treasures in a box nearby (instead of hidden away in tins and drawers), and if I take off the lid, I also have a little assemblage frame. As the objects are beautiful as they are, I decided to not add any paints or other media and keep their original state.

I just needed to alter the look of the idea-ology "Salvaged" word band using alcohol inks to make it match the other objects' colours.

I think the original colour from the yellowed passport paper, the shabby white of the frozen charlotte and the vintage buttons, the orange tones on the finnabair pieces and the rusty spring alongside the red from the thread that holds the passport pages together and from the stamp in the top right corner all go together really well! And the black box frame repeats the black of the writing - so all the elements fuse together beautifully. Only the blue jumper forms a little contrast - but that makes the oranges, browns and pale yellow-ish colours pop even more.

Playing around with colours, shapes and composition was not only fun but also a very relaxing thing to do. And browsing my treasures in all their boxes and little drawers was very enjoyable too. ;)

I hope to see you over at our challenge blog, where you will find all the other fabulous projects of Team B today! And of course I hope you will join in our challenge and have a lot of steampunk creating fun!

Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia

 xxx