A Dogs Dream

I am preparing this post for you because I will have to do a lot of preparing and packing for our skiing holiday during the next hours...but I was so very inspired by Sarah Hand's lesson on Soul Food yesterday that I just HAD to do this project as the idea hit my mind and almost "forced" me into making it as soon as any possible before it got lost again.

And I am very happy with it because the result is really close to what I had in mind - which is one of those happy moments in a crafter's or painter's life, isn't it? ;)

Lovely Sarah lured us into creating a shadow box and I LOVE shadow boxes! But what I am even more thankful for is that she made me draw and paint again and do some joyful(!) illustrating, which I haven't done in a long, long time. I really enjoyed seeing my brush-drawn sketches turn into gorgeous images once I took the plunge and coloured them without looking back and fiddling any more on any details (which honestly is what ruins my drawings or paintings most of the time).

I hope you like my "dogs dream" too. I love my dog girlie, Bluna, and when we go for a walk we always meet a lot of crows, who drop their walnuts onto the asphalt to crack them open. Sometimes they land in front of Bluna to make her chase after them and when she starts to run they just fly up...only to land a tiny bit further away so Bluna starts running again... they play with her :). And Bluna never really chases them...so I guess she plays along too.

As Bluna also loves to run up and down hills (like a mad-dog, being shot from a canon), I made some hills for her too. And which dog would NOT love to have a sky full of bones? Well - at least this is my dog's dream. Of that I am sure ;)

I added some stamping with the hills and the cloud for more texture, but most of the images I used on this shadow box are quick drawings (using a fine tip brush and heavily diluted dark grey acrylic colour), which were painted afterwards and given finer details for a finish using crayons and markers.

I love crows. They are not only very intelligent birds but they also behave really funny and I am convinced that they often make jokes. I also once saw on TV that they trick the other crows when hiding away their "treasures" by pretending to hide them in one place (so that all the others can see) and then hiding it somewhere else (while the others search the wrong place and don't watch). Clever, huh?

I used an old box which I covered with scraps from text printed tissue wrap (thank you, Alison ;). Then I painted the inside of my shadow box with DecoArt Americana acrylic colours and only toned down the print on the outside using white Gesso.

The cut out images were glued to the box with stacked sticky foam pads which I layered from only one to up to three pads to achieve various levels of depth. You can see some of them on the image above.

I love the shadows and the depth of this. I also used sticky foam pads for the bones to make them look like they were floating in Bluna's dream sky.

I hope you enjoyed your visit! Thank you for stopping by!
Claudia xx