Illustration: Asparagus

Last post I promised to share with you where I used my new hand carved asparagus stamp.

This was part of an exercise from Jane LaFazio’s on-line class that I talked about here.

We were to paint a vegetable of our choice, make a hand carved stamp or two and incorporate it all together into one design.

Here is my design – with my painted asparagus, asparagus stamp and hand lettering (I just love to add lettering to things!)

When I created this I honestly had no idea what I was going to put into the middle of it.  Having had asparagus on my mind for a couple of day, I started to get hungry for my favorite asparagus dish – Oven Roasted Asparagus.

Ah ha moment!  Why not add the recipe to the middle of this design?  So that’s what I did (and got to practice some more hand lettering to boot!).

You’ll notice that I added a couple of extra details including the original label from the asparagus package which I distressed using alcohol inks.  These inks are a lot of fun because they work on practically any surface (except plain ‘ol paper!).

If you look closely you will notice that a couple of the stamps have been added as a collage layer.  That’s called a mistake that turned into a “happy accident”.  A couple of the stamped images turned out pretty poorly and at one point I was about ready to scrap the entire piece.  After all the work I had invested in it I decided to try to salvage it instead.  So I cut out some stamped images and glued them over the crappy ones.  It worked out great!  Now there was even more dimension in my mixed media piece!

I was thinking that if I created 11 more seasonal veggie designs to go with this one, I could make it into a cute (and tasty) wall calendar.  What do you think?