A Minor Distraction

I was browsing Michael's craft shop, as I tend to do, when I spied these wooden tags in the scrap booking section. I'd come to buy frames and mats for my paintings, armed with discount coupons, but my brain went off in a different direction. As it tends to do.

 I've made tags before, both from fabric, and scraps of watercolour paper, but these sturdy little boards were quite enticing. I covered them in various colours of Golden acrylic paint, adding a few drops of metallic gold or silver paint to each hue to give a light shimmer as it soaked into the wood. Then I added stenciling and stamping to make background textures.

From there I found images of birds (and butterflies and bees) to begin painting, outlining each first in black ink, then layering paint. sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent.
Here is the beginnings of a bee landing on a flower.

And here are finished tags, with additional accents, silk ribbon ties, and a few layers of glossy Modge Podge to seal them.

I am still in the process of making more. They will be on display at the Artist's Studio Tour next month, and are currently on my Etsy page as well.