An art gift for my niece

This is a new piece I created on Sunday. It's a gift for my 16 year old niece for Christmas, to go along with a gift card to a bookstore. Her name is Shannon, and she's a fine young lady who has a voracious appetite for reading books. She's been an avid reader for many years now. She is also a fine writer, and has been writing and journaling for years also. I've read some of her writing, and am so impressed with her intelligence and talent. She's a darn good writer, and I believe has the potential to be published at some point.

Well, I was an avid reader and writer at her age, so I can relate to her in that way. I think I can relate to her very well. And I'm so proud of her and I love her, and am lucky to have her as a niece. And so I thought it would be nice to make her a small piece of art for Christmas. I wanted to make something to encourage her in her writing. At least that was the goal of this piece.

This is a 4x6 inch postcard format, and the base is frozen pizza cardboard. The background is a multi-colored piece of scrapbook paper glued down on the base. Then I used gel medium to glue down a piece of dyed cheese cloth on the left half of the piece. I cut some quotes on "Authorship" out of a book, crumpled it up, then rubbed brown paste shoe polish over it, and glued that down over the cheese cloth. The hearts were punched out of paint chips. The circle and triangle shapes are vinyl paper clips. I wrote the text with Bic permanent markers, and then rubbed the shoe polish over that whole part, including over the paper clips. I sealed the whole piece with Acrylic Floor Finish. (You can find it at Family Dollar stores.)

This was a fun, simple piece to make. I hope the message will mean something to Shannon, and that she'll find it encouraging. Because I really want to encourage her to pursue her writing, I think she is that good.