Eastertide~Asylum Anne

Easter, and the commercial world expects us to take great joy in helping our families towards obesity & diabetes by buying up Easter eggs.  CT-Kim had shared an idea  that took off in my mind.  I know I've got some polystyrene eggs somewhere.  Find my stash of polystyrene shapes fairly easily - no eggs.  But adjacent were a packet of Christmas baubles that come in 2 halves, to be decorated, connected and hung.  So I digressed.  Alcohol inkpads for some newly-arrived Rubberdance stamps on the outside.  Now here's one of the joys of unmounted stamps - you can place them in the palm of your hand, press an curved object into your hand and mould the stamp round the shape to get a decent impression:

I have some brown-tinted cottonwool in here.
Next was to drizzle & spread some alcohol inks on the inside of the bauble:

Losing the mushroom images a bit - probably because I didn't use black ink, but brown.  Apologies for the photos - camera gone to hospital under warranty, so I'm using a mixture of cellphone camera which likes to add a pink cast, and DH's swanky heavy camera.
Maybe I'd better pop out and get some polystyrene egg shapes after all, it's only a 5-minute drive...
I poked kebab sticks up their fat ends, coated them with gel medium first, then started stamping.  One then got a wash of brown paint, then some granular gel (Golden) painted dark blue, then bits of a pterodactyl stuck into it.  Another... a theme was developing with magic mushrooms and genetic modification perhaps:

and from a different angle

Not my "normal" stamp purchase, but I'm liking that figure/person.  I played with a few more eggs then got sidetracked, as one does.  And facebook kept throwing up umpteen challenges that were interesting.  So I grabbed one of Ike's Art images - the Zombie cat & dog, printed it, coloured it, and decided it was too small against the eggs.  So I enlarged it, printed it, coloured it... and being a Christian celebration, gave them halos.

What do you think of the dead cockroach on top of Pandora's box?  By now I realised I was needing a shadow box for this piece, and it needed to be pretty large.  But no problem - I've been tripping over a couple of usps boxes lately.  February is usually a ruinously expensive month with "superbowl" sales etc. and goodies have found their way to me by mid-March.

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That watermark should really say Anne pigstyed this!  But cloths on clothespegs hanging off the protective sheet over the (ex)dining table are ideally placed when one needs finger-wiping.  One of those eggs is being "auditioned" in the green cup.  Good size, these boxes.  34x28x8cm!!! Then I got sidetracked (it was the following weekend) and there's a op shop that has a junky branch down a back street.  I wandered in there, spotted a picture frame that looked about the same size as the boxes so I grabbed it, and it turned out to be an almost perfect fit.  Masking tape at the back to hold the frame to one box, and layering strips of heavy paper bags on the front will make it pretty sturdy.  Now you can buy these "period" advertising-covered bags from Stampington - or something similar.  But I get mine free - Silver Crow Creations pack some of my shopping in them before shipping in a box, and I'm often shopping there... so I'm recycling with a vengeance at this stage.

As I'm working on this and subsequent layers of stencils, I'm meditating on the diverse elements that are coming into this piece, about the "quirkiness" of humans in these hi-tech days of taking onboard zombies, despite science relieving the Middle Ages people from those fears of people rising from the dead in random states of decay, to steampunk, which  romanticises a mechanical era that relied on coal, steam, causing such pollution. Genetically modified critturs in the eggs, becoming extinct, man's fascination with unscientific things-

And the theme begins to emerge. 

From Sacred to the Profane (Secular).  From superstition to science.  From the Christian beliefs about God, to the way we (mis)treat our selves and environment, and romanticise those outmoded beliefs that our intelligence has disproved.  I like working with steampunk, but it IS pretty much a fictional notion - so are Alice and Wizard of Oz - but that's another session.

OK, so that's explaining all the random elements that are coming together.  This is what I ended up with, followed by some closeups:

The frame got the Demented Derma crackle treatment.  I played with my hot glue gun, the cogs were diecut then coated with Ice Resin in a strip to go down the side of the frame.  All the text was printed on white paper and cut.

Top Left: Hanging off the hot-glue web - obligatory spider, having caught a shrunken head from Butterside Down Stamps.  Can you find the gas mask behind it, or the dove?

Bottom left:

Had the leg & boot from Caustic Ratflynger by Rick St Dennis made into a "stuffie", left over from another project - Carbon footprint!   The delightful hedgehog-looking crittur is a Mini Meckie - a groundhog - still trying to look after the season-change for the Americans.

Moving to the right, some more eggs.  The blue one has broken open and a bloodied hand is reaching out (was it perhaps a landmine?) to grab the planet - a bead depicting the globe.  It also has a crown of "thorns".

I used the same 3 stencils from TCW, Joggles and Stencil Girl, repeated with 2 & 3 layers of each, finishing with just a couple of words from Seth Apter's Unfinished stencil first coloured in a  dark red, then an interference paint very lightly over it.  Viva las vegas stamps alien baby face and Nosferatu were stamped on tissue paper several times and glued to the background in places.  The box the zombies are sitting on is labelled "Pandora's box".

Top right diecut dove, diecut tombstone - is an autumn leaf dried, laminated then diecut, the heart is a diecut coated with granular gel, indicating the emptied tomb, the hope for redemption.

Both left and right sidewalls have steampunk characters from Third Stone stamps - one visible here.

All sorts of goodies have come from silvercrowcreations - gas mask (look hard behind the spider web), spider, cockroach, shredded greenbacks, globe bead, thermometer, the monkeys with attitude, mini meckies (groundhogs), lightbulb and crinkle wire holding it for instance.

If you can find a ray of hope in this tale of man's inhumanity to man, hang on to it!  Meantime, let your own expressions of the dark, the weird, come to light and shared at evil froggie's  Linky  Your ray of sunshine might be to win something from this month's sponsor, Make It Crafty if you do.

Asylum Anne doesn't have her own blog, so she's hijacking this post to share with the following blog challenges:

Show Us Your Pussies for Lucky kitties (define "luck!")

Things to Alter steampunk challenge

Left of Centre challenge #122

Forever Dark 2 Marchchallenge