Hug and nowhere

Once again I turned to the Paper Artsy blog for inspiration for my entry to the Craft Barn Quote challenge. The words are Hug and Nowhere and I selected a quote based on my having the perfect stamps from Paper Artsy for it (Hot Pick 1208).
Wanda had used alcohol inks on tiles and I wanted to have another go after the less than successful attempt in this project. You can see her wonderful work here. I'll admit there isn't a lot in common in the end, apart from the alcohol inks and the painting, but having chosen such detailed stamps and used paper that turned out even more absorbent than glossy paper let alone ceramic,  things didn't pan out this way.

Still I liked the atmospheric results, so I went with it.

Without further ado a dark, wet wintry London:

For the background I started like Wanda with drops of ink and added alcohol to get it moving because the card was absorbing the ink and the inks were drying too fast. Getting increasingly desperate I added inks, alcohol, more inks, added the opaque Snowcap, the shimmering Pearl, more alcohol... you get the picture.

I stamped the Big Ben image partially with Versafine and embossed with clear powder so I wouldn't have to worry about painting later. It wasn't very dark so I switched to Archival for my bus. This worked out well, as clear embossed Archival ink is almost as dark as black embossing and it made Big Ben recedes as per aerial perspective.

I painted the stamped image with white as way to make them stand out from the background and when dry wiped the embossed areas clean. The embossing still looked cloudy so I reheated it and this brought the shine back.

I added the quote by Vivienne Westwood in pen and white ink and a bit of silver around the panel.

Thanks for coming by,