I spent last weekend assembling the base components for three more shrines, and today I finished decorating one of them.  I was originally going to have three shelves inside, each with something on it, but instead I experimented with multi-layered collage.

In the far background is a piece of a landscape. Originally I painted it myself, but I didn’t like my own painting very well, so I used one from a book on American painting.  I perused architecture drawings until I found this of the vaulted ceiling, and I cut a window so you can see the landscape behind.  There’s a quarter inch of foam core board between the landscape and the vaulted ceiling drawing, to give it depth, and there’s another quarter inch of foam core between the vaulted ceiling drawing and the sheet of plexiglass that has the small swallows adhered to the backside of it.  The larger swallow has more foam core behind it, so that it’s a little bit in front of the smaller ones.  The swallows are from Audubon.

I wanted something with a theatrical flair, something Victorian, which is why I did the flourishes on the outside in gold (stamped and embossed).  The curtains match the gold embossing powder.  I had to iron and sew them and play around with them a bit to get them to hang properly.

When I was looking for landscapes, I found a number of nineteenth century paintings.  I copied them and cut the copies into strips, collaging it onto the outside so that it would have the colors and brushstrokes of oil paintings, but not the subject matter.  I think the dark colors and reds go well with the purple trim.

Inside the attic, I put pages from a mystery novel, but I didn’t like the color of the paper, so I put different writing on top of it (purchased as part of a scrapbooking/collage paper sample pack.)  The obvious thing for the attic would be a bird’s nest, but I didn’t have one small enough, and I didn’t have any eggs even to go with the big one (except chicken eggs, which would be too large.) 

I did, however, have a small bottle I made in my borosilicate flameworking class, which unfortunatley had a tempering issue and lost its bottom. Not as obvious as a bird’s nest.  Works well enough.