Design Team Throwdown #6- Danse Macabre

Hello everyone, thanks for visiting today and checking out the Smeared Ink Design Team's entries for the 6th Design Team Throwdown. If you don't know what the throwdown is, please visit Smeared and Smudged here and get all of the details. Basically, each month different Design Teams compete against each other by making fab projects, there is a round of voting to choose the winning team, and then the winners choose the next month's challenge. It's a super blast and the Smeared Ink DT has really enjoyed participating with all of the awesomely talented DT members from all teams!

This month our Challenge 5 winners, Airless Chambers DT, chose the theme of "DANSE MACABRE". All participants were to interpret the theme how they wanted to and show how they view the universality of death, or "Dance of Death".

Without further ado, here are the Smeared Ink DT entries.

#1 Our first entry comes to you from Susan:

Susan rocked out a mask of death using the skull front from Smeared Ink's Anatomy 101 set. To check out all of the details on Susan's project, please visit her blog here.

#2 Our second entry is from Helen:

Helen created a whimsically wicked mobile using images from Smeared Ink's Venice digi set, Danse Macabre digi set, and the Dead Dancer singles. To read more details, please visit Helen's blog here.

#3 Our third entry was done by Terra (me! ):

For my Danse Macabre project, I altered a yoga mat using images from Smeared Ink's Anatomy 101 digi set, Old King Cole from the Framed Rhymes set, and the Falling and Pointing Dead Dancers singles.

(my daughter posed so you can see how big it is, she's as tall as me)

I have to say this is one of the most frustrating projects I have ever made, even though the end result looks pretty simple. I have NO IDEA what possessed me to alter my yoga mat, other than I was just tired of looking at the plain, boring thing. It ended up taking way longer than I had anticipated, and I am definitely the reason the Smeared Ink team post went up last minute. Well, at least I can say I finished :)

I started by altering the King Cole image by inserting the Anatomy 101 skull as the face and changing the word to say "Danse". Then I printed out my new pimp daddy death image (Cole + Skull) and the two dead dancers, but I had to super-size them to fit on more than one paper. Cole took four pages (he's big), while each dancer took two. That in itself was an issue because my printer gave me problems and didn't size them right the first few times, but finally I got it right.

Then I took my images and did image transfers using modge poge onto my mat. I've never done this type of transfer successfully before on anything other than paper or canvas, so it was a learning process. Unfortunately, my placement of "Pimp Daddy Death" was not dead center at the top of the mat, but oh well. After completing the transfer, letting it dry, etc etc, and removing the back layer of paper, I was able to faintly see my image lines. Then the painting started. It took FOREVER to paint just the three images, and I even left out some of the image lines as I saw fit. I had originally transferred on all 5 of the Danse Macabre skeleton images as well (Smeared Ink), but before painting I scraped and peeled them off because I didn't like how they looked.

After I finished with my three main images, I decided to spray paint my mat edges with red and black, and then paint on my roses and swirls. It was a combo of freehand and a rose stencil. I've never used a stencil before, another first for this project, but I think it still came out decent. The roses have between two and four layers of paint. Finally, to finish off the mat and prevent the paint from peeling off during use, I applied a clear varnish over the whole thing.

If you're wondering if I'll actually use the mat, the answer to that is HELL YES, after all that work I better get some use out of it, lol. I hope you've enjoyed reading about my project, and please visit the other members of the SI team on their blogs to hear all about their creative processes and let us all know what you think.

Good luck to all of the teams playing in the Throwdown this time around.

PLEASE COME VOTE for your favorite THURSDAY, FRIDAY, and SATURDAY! Voting will end Sat midnight. 

Vote Here