An earthy unveiling.

I was gonna wait until this Friday to post my finished piece for the "Peoples of the Earth" challenge at Two Twelve.  But I'm like a little kid who can't keep a secret.  I'm awful, what can I say?  And enough people have already gotten a look at it, so I figured I could morally and ethically unveil it here now.

 

"Our Lady of the Slums"

 

If you do a Google search for "world slum images", you'll see hundreds of images that inspired this piece.  I've been hanging on to this old print block tray for years, ever since I found it at an antique shop in town.  Just to give you an idea of how long I've had it, the antique shop has since closed, reopened at a different location, and closed again.  A sad sign of the times.  But I guess this tray was just waiting for this challenge to come about. 

 

 

Because this is an Earth-related challenge, we get extra points for using recycled materials in our works.  I used cut-up soup cans, window screen, and one of hubby's old holey T-shirts in this piece, to name just a few recycled bits.  Not bad, huh?

 

 

I found an old photograph at yet another antique shop of a girl on her first Communion.  It's not the first time that I've used her picture in one of my works, and I had stuck her in the tray shortly after I bought it.  I'm not sure what I had in mind at the time, but that idea never really panned out.  But as I got going on creating my "slum", I decided to leave her picture in there.  I thought that a desperate scene needed some glimmer of hope, and she was it.  So she is "Our Lady of the Slums."

 

 

 

Let's lighten the mood with some more "Llama Love", shall we?  The next dose comes from a horizontal Alpha Betty I made a while back.  It needs no explanation.  Enjoy!

 

xoxo