Pirates!

A couple of more scrap journal pages from my summer trip to the Outer Banks of NC to share with you...more pirates for the theme today.

So I am trying to make this collection have more of a homemade journalistic feel, plus playing around with me designing more items on pages. I love how this page came out, and it's a good way to make it artistic but at the same time show a photo-the sign on Ocracoke of where Blackbeard was killed.

I started by drawing the rope-ish image and coloring it and then adding some pirate type of words. I moved on to drawing the chest, and coloring it and then adding some Viva pearl dots and some gold dots to fill the chest. I'll be honest, this page took me several days of playing around and adding things to it until I decided I was happy with it. The priate flag is a Cuttlebug die, and though you can't see it here I cut it from Black Tyvek fabric which gave it a real rough look since even though I ran the die through the Big Kick several times the edges still are a bit ratty- but I liked that. I keep adding the pearls and gold too over time, to finish it off. I also decided it needed some anchors, which are German scrap gold that I distressed.

It still needed more so I added the little dots around the rope edge, and then I decided to distress stain the out page edge (the page is done on watercolor paper cut down). Then I stained the inside of the rope lighter, and then decided that needed some stripes of darker distress stain. Finally I added the photo of the sign which I cut out of the photo it was in. As I said, I am thrilled the finished result, it is a very new type of page for me and I love the fact that I can be happy with my finished created work!!!

This page is a little more traditional for me. I started by stamping pirate images in blue and red on white watercolorpaper. Still, it needed distressing so I used 2 brown shades of ink which I rubbed the whole pads right over my stamping. I do like how you can see bits of the images just peeking through. Then I added the brown paper and added the photo of Dave and the pirate statue. I did a rough cut of this out of the big photo and then used black Sharpie to color in around the edges of both Dave and the pirate-I needed to get rid of the busy background I couldn't not include in the original photo. I had die cut the ship and waves when I die cut the flag for the top page, only I used white paper here and did some coloring, stamped a skull and crossbone image and wrote in my info. Finally, I thought it still needed something so I stamped the ahoy over the page, masking my photo area, and added a few brads around the photo and outlined the paper in black. Needed that grungy pirate feel -think I got it, I hope at least.