Matryoshka Dolls for PaperArtsy Hidden Things Theme

Over on the PaperArtsy Blog I am very pleased to show you my take on the theme of 'Hidden Things' which is the current challenge. Leandra did an amazing introduction to the challenge which you can see here. I was a bit worried when I read it though as I my first thought when I had seen the theme some weeks ago was 'ah, Russian nesting dolls!'. So when I read the post I thought, 'oh, just me then!'. So I hope even if it is just the way my mind works, and I have gone off into a weird tangent of wooden peasant dolls hiding inside each other, you will humour me and enjoy these brightly coloured glossy little folk creatures!

When I did my research on Google images I found that there were all kinds of nesting dolls that were still quite traditional, for instances some had five dolls, some seven, some ten; some are scaled down versions of the same image; some are not even the same gender; some depict fairy tales; some are of political figures. There are also Japanese ones called Kokeshi, which look a bit different, with a different shaped main body. I decided to stick to the iconic peasant woman with the round face and the head scarf, for the simple reason that I wanted you to be able to recognize it for what I intended it to be, rather than think, what the heck has she made!! Now that I have struggled with my design, it all looks really simple, but I found it really difficult because I wanted to use stamps which would enable each doll to be a scaled down version of the one before. Once I'd done the one for PaperArtsy I thought, ok I'll do a no pressure one for my own blog now and do a Kokeshi, just as a variation. So here it is:-

I used Lynne Perrella again, and the Asian Plate 4, and some terrible hand drawing. Here they are, all in a row:-

I do hope you will enter the hidden things challenge. As always it's a wonderful prize!