Flower person ATC

I must admit, I was a little stumped for this ATC. I took it as a challenge to myself - that's what I like about Swap-bot: other people think of the ideas, then you have a deadline to do them by. It's what makes the difference, for me, between thinking "oh, I'd like to do that one day" to "you need to do this now, and make it good because it's going out to somebody!"

Anyway, the swap stipulated the following:

The idea here is to use a flower, be it stamped, prima type, paper etc etc, and put a face in the middle and give it a body and have a beautiful little flower person.

I had some lovely flower stickers I wanted to use, but was a little bit apprehensive about the body.

In the end, I traced a baby picture from a book I picked up at Abbey's bookshop: Anatomy and Drawing, by Victor Perard.

Ideally I'll be drawing my own figures, but I'm not quite ready yet. So I traced the picture in pencil, and then went over it in a felt-tip pen. I wasn't sure how I was going to colour it - it didn't look right in b&w. Then I remembered how at school we'd make old-looking "parchment" by rubbing a wet teabag on paper.

So I wet a teabag in a small amount of hot water, squeezed most of the water out, and dabbed the picture with it. It made the felt ink run a little, which I liked - otherwise I could have done the pen outline afterwards. For good measure, I dipped my finger into the instant coffee jar and dotted them around the wet picture, which left little brown spots. To stop the paper curling, I placed it between 2 sheets of paper and left it to dry under a heavy book.

I recently picked up some blank ATC cards at Eckersley's Art & Craft store, which has made life much easier. For my last ATC, I used some cardstock I had lying around, but my cutting was a little wonky. Anyway, I used some green scrapbooking papers for the background, and... voilà! Not exactly Ann Geddes, but still!