Gothic Arch #6 - Men

Here's my arch for the Inkurable Stampers Gothic Arch Challenge #6 - Men. I showed this to hubby and he said, "Nice work, Mel."

Now for those of you who are Flight of the Conchords fans, you will know what I'm talking about. For those who don't, Flight of the Conchords is a New Zealand folk comedy duo, who had a series on HBO a while ago. Their fan, Mel, was completely in love with them, and had made a lot of fan art for them. I'm not sure whether this is fan art or not, and it's definitely not in Mel's league.

My brother and his wife tipped us off to this show and we found it completely hilarious and we watched the episodes again this summer at the cottage. I thought it might be fun to use their picture for the "Men" theme, since my "men' stamps are pretty limited. I found this picture of them on-line and printed it off since it looked so perfect for a collage. I also printed off a map of New Zealand and kiwi bird, as well as some sheet music from a free digi download. There is some stamping on here: crowns (left - Stampin' Up, right Tim Holtz /Stampers Anonymous), print (TH/Stampers Anon) and the birds (TH/Stampers Anonymous). I look at this and think maybe I could use this for my collage class on shapes. It was completely unintentional, or maybe just gut instinct, but there are similar shapes here: the arch, the shape of the people, the crowns, even the islands. Hmm. When I tried to do this for the class, I wound up with the ugliest thing I have ever made. For a lesson on shapes, I wound up using every different shape going, with the result warned about in the lesson (ie avoid too many competing shapes yield an ugly project). Anyway, maybe this is why this collage seems to work - the shapes are somewhat harmonious. The kiwi was going to be a parrot on Bret's shoulder, since the space seemed empty, but I couldn't quickly find a free download of parrot so I thought of a kiwi bird instead. It looked better on Jemaine's crown, so there he perches, delicately pecking at the South Island. So there we have it - three icons of the Southern Hemisphere.