Seeing Little Green Men!

On Saturday, we were invited to dinner at the home of my Other Half's colleague, B.  B is a lovely, warm and very creative lady, who also happens to be a Pagan. Her home is filled with paintings and carvings, most of which are her own works of art. We had a lovely evening, with good food, good company and good conversation.  Now, I'm a lover of thank you cards - I like to receive them and to send them, which, of course, gives me an opportunity to break out the crafty stash and make them!  I decided that because B was Pagan, I would use the Green Man as my starting point, as she has several of these woodland spirits on her walls.  I have a beautiful A5 stack of Hot Off The Press Earth Tones, which included a beautiful bronze paper and a co-ordinating green/brown, which gave the feel of looking up through autumn foliage.  Next I used some pearlescent sage green (bought some time ago from The Paper Mill at our local shopping complex) and cut out several oak leaves, eight large and eight small.  I burnished these to curl them a little and then applied some green chalk to the edges for definition.  I also marked in some veining with my bone folder, just to give them a little texture. 

My original idea was to draw the Green Man and simply attach the leaves around him, so, with this in mind, I googled a few pictures for inspiration.  One of the images was of a stone carved Green Man and I was very taken by the three-dimensional representation.  So, I set to work and tried to create my own version.  This is what I came up with:

Unfortunately, the photograph really doesn't do it justice - it makes it look a lot less sophisticated than it really is and the colours aren't quite rich enough. But you get the idea.

Anyway, I added a few circles for berries and mounted it with ribbon on the Earth Tones papers I had picked and the finished result looked like this:

I couldn't put it in an ordinary envelope and I didn't have any card to hand thick enough to make a box, so I decided to create a box-a-lope - a cross between the two - and tie it with ribbon.

It was fun to make something a bit different for a change and I was actually quite pleased with the result. My Other Half took the whole thing into work for B today and she was delighted with it, which is what counts, don't you think?