sss Monday - Love is in the air

Having finally got back to making a few crads last week, I thought I'd step up and try something a bit more meaty for this week's challenge at Simon says stamp - Monday.
The theme this week is "love is in the air". Next week is our 25th wedding anniversary (gulp - no idea how that went so fast, or when I became so adult!).
So I started with a copy of my favourite photo of that day (on plain white cardstock) and started to play.

I gessoed over most of the photo, just leaving our heads (in the original there's a camera tripod growing out of my head and a car right behind my husband so I wasn't sorry to lose either of those features). Bacause of the computer ink this turned the gesso a pinky colour, which I didn't mind as I knew it's add to the warm tones. And then I went for it - there's some TH old dictionary tissue, some lace, a few TH remnant rubs - you get the idea. The colour comes mostly from glimmer mist in sugar maple (to match hubby's orange hair! That's faded a bit in the past 25 years), and green. There's also distress paint in broken china and pumice. I'd smeared a little micro glaze over the faces before I started to try and minimize the "blebs", but the few that snuck through help it all blend together. When I'd finished the heart I wanted to build up the layers to turn it into a picture for the mantle.

I used all the same inks, paints and sprays to make the backing paper (on a manila folder), mounted the heart on a thick piece of black embossed with Darice stripe embossing folder, offset a thick piece of cork tile and finally added the wedding date on the label tape.
A detail shot...