Chinese New Year swap

2011 is the year of the rabbit, and a metal year, as well.

Red is the color of celebration in China, which caused some problems when I was working for a Japanese man and his Chinese wife. She would leave the office girls notes written in red in with lots of exclamation points and everyone thought they were really getting yelled at and often wound up in tears. It fell to me as the G.M. to talk to the Chinese woman and explain that it was very upsetting to get these notes from her.

She was amazed and explained that she thought she was leaving happy, exciting notes because they were RED and had lots of happy marks!!!!!!!!  Really makes you see how wars start, doesn't it?

Anyway, I used a fireworks stamp on watercolor paper with RED gouache paint for ink as a background. The rabbit emblem was printed, colored, and cut out. Added some red sequins, stamped 'celebrate 2011' in black and gold, and finished off with some gold trim. Looks pretty festive to me. It'll be fun to see what I get back.