Big Aspirations

I had originally made this ATC with the hopes of joining Marion Bockelmann's annual blog swap but I was just too busy to get all of my cards made in time for the deadline.  Instead, I am contributing this ATC to the Paper Traders monthly winner-take-all lottery.

Renaissance Women

On Paper Traders, Connie is hosting a Gothic Arch swap - the pages will be added to the deco books we made last year.  The theme this time is "Renaissance Women" and I wanted to use works that were a little lesser known.  I chose women who where all painted by Il Bronzino - in most cases, these women were background characters in his works.  For example, these women...

...can be found in this fresco:

 

And these two women...

...are found in this painting:

The backgrounds on these arches have more texture than really shows in the scans.  I glued down torn vintage (gothic) texts and then covered with napkins or tissue paper.  I used my gold leafing pen to finish the edges of each page.  On each of them, I added accents with metallic & pearlescent paints and more touches with my gold pen!

Here are the rest of the pages I made...