Castle Street - Inspired by Alison aka Butterfly for Paper Artsy

I hadn't intended to do a second challenge entry for Paper Artsy at all. Then last night it was a toss up between Bruce Forsyth and Alison aka Butterfly - no contest really! Although I did have a sneaky half hour with Sarah Millican! My craft room lured me back in for the evening as my favourite of Alison's three projects this week had been her incredibly imaginative, quirky, and downright mad Dollshouse Street. I love Alison's work and I think this is her best ever and I think we should see more of her mad side - let it out!

I really wanted to try Alison's technique of using the side of a piece of card and some Frescos to do the sky in horizontal strokes and the grass in vertical stokes. I was afraid in my hands it would look like a child's painting but it is surprisingly impressionistic. You have to be quite free and not think about it too much. I used a piece of mountboard where Alison had used a wooden piece from a child's toy. Alison had used the Doll range of stamps from Ink and the Dog but I only have one set so I decided to go with Lynne Perella, with the addition of the Mini Script 26 and Hot Pick 1009.

I started off by stamping all the Lynne Perella stamps I have in Coffee and Sepia Archival on white card stock and then desconstructed them. Alison had houses and I had castles!! So I fussy cut around turrets, and for the other shapes I used a mixture of dies - squares, arches, and a shield for a gherkin building! I also cut a set of Tim Holtz Pediments, some in plain white card, and some in shrink plastic for the smaller buildings, and stamped these with script. I then played around with placement of my pieces.

In addition to the free-style grasses I also stamped the grasses and birds from HP 1009 in brown and green although I don't think this was strictly necessary. I edged the whole piece in Sepia and then finished off with some Treasure Gold in Ice Fire.