Wedding Shrine - quick update

But first, some Fine Whine:

I have to admit, I really don't like Blogger's format. I have another blog about the rest of my life (yes, I have one, such as it is), hosted by Typepad, and the options are endless, the format easy and intuitive. I opened this on Blogger, as an experiment, and I'm not happy with the result. Especially when posting photos. They just seem to appear wherever they want. Compared to Typepad, Blogger blows.

And now, back to our regular programming:

I spent a day or so laying on the gesso to cover all the ugliness and leopard spots. Then I mixed paint to match the invitation -- I opened it in Photoshop, did the eyedropper thingy, and made a sort of paint-chip pallette of the shades of red, lighter red, pale pink, pale yellow and bronze to check against. I need a cool color in there for contrast, can't have it entirely made of warm shades, so I'll probably work in my favorite dark teal as a small accent.

Yesterday, I laid down the background color, same as the background color on the invitation, which appears like a light red -- not pink exactly, just over the line into red. My carefully mixed acrylic, which matched the pallette shade exactly on my paint chip chart, went on smoothly. Unfortunately, it looked like I had poured a bottle of Pepto-Bismol over it. Precisely that shade of obnoxious pink. How could it look red on the invitation? I told myself not to get despondent, it will dry darker, and I'm planning to use a transparent bright red glaze over all the tints of red. I've put on the darker red today on some areas, and it appeared to be what the first shade should have been. After it dried and a second coat of both colors, I'm more optimistic. Once I apply some detail work tonight -- the swirly, fringy shape of the darker red on the top half of the invitation is going down the sides of the srhine over the paler red -- I'll glaze it first thing tomorrow and it should be, as Goldilocks said, "just right." In the meantime I'm working on the collage to go inside, and some reinforcement for the back panel, which will be covered with ribbons.

Here's the invitation, with the lettering Photoshopped out.

Or maybe not. I can't get the picture to load. Right format, all according to the instructions.... and nada. I really don't like Blogger. I really, really don't.