seadragons ! ....

Do you know that seadragons really exist ? 

I worked in Elena's evolutionjournal. Her journal started about mermaids, but instead of evolving from page to page into something completely different, the pages unfold a hidden world of the sea.

Valerie's page before me showed a sleeping king of the sea : Neptune.

Would they have pets in the seaworld ? I think so... A sea-king can't have a simple fish as pet, but what about seadragons ? 

Googling for images I found seadragons and believe it or not but these creatures really exist !! 

They are gorgeous and there are several varieties with different colors.

They look a bit like seahorses but their body seems to exist of seaweed.

I created a waterworld for these seasdragons by spritzing my papers with green and blue sprayinks.

Most sprayinks react with water ànd salt. In the middle of the pages I sprinkled seasalt on the wet pages to add more layers to the "water".

Just let it dry with the salt on it and then wipe the salt off. 

This is the left page where one of the seadragons is peeping from behind a waterplant.

On the right page a red seadragon is coming closer.

The images of the seadragons were downloaded from the internet, scaled and printed on canvaspaper. Then I have to carefully cut them out, trying not to cut off parts of their body...

The large waterplants are made with a stamp of Dyan Reavely. When I prepared the papers of the background I made them larger then needed. 

Now I could stamp the leaves with permanent ink on the left over pages so I immediately had a colored background.

I colored the leaves with different product : distress stain, Steward Gill paints and distress stickles.

The other plants on the pages were made with the same leftover paper. I like how not one of the "seaweed" looks the same.

The seaweed is actually the leaves of the "tattered pinecone" die of Tim Holtz.

I first diecut a piece of left over packaging paper with this die. To create a more layered background I used this selfmade stencil and inked through it with different distress inks overlapping each other.

Die cuts of the leaves were then adhered with glossy accents on top.

The colored large plants were mounted with 3D foam on the background to create more depth in the pages.

For the rest I haven't been creating a lot the past week.

It's was an emotional week with the funeral of 13 months old Boris, the marriage of a collegue, the missing of my daughter Gaia, who's at her boyfriends house for 2 weeks (!) and son Freek who's in London for a week making real  international contacts with people he often plays with on the internet...

But I have also done a lot !  My back is finally really approving after the second facetinfiltration and visits to a manual therapist. The combination has done wonders after having backpain for months...

I wanted to paint my veranda already for a very long time, but the backpain stood in the way.

Now I'm finished for 2/3... The green is changing in a "Turkish stoneblue"...

In the past I would have finished this in 2 days, but now I limit myself to do just parts of it so I don't overdo myself and it works :)

In the meantime while moving furniture, I'm cleaning what 's IN the closets... I think I have too much stuff, too much papers...

So inspired by "clean house", I have three boxes : keep and reorganize, trash and give away...

It does feel good ! 

I'll show you the result when I'm finished.

Inge