Athens Acropolis

Scrappy Monday, peeps!  I've been scrappin' so many pages so fast lately, it's hard to choose what to share next.  Today I've got not one, but two layouts from our Mediterranean cruise, specifically when we got to see Athens!

See the original pictures here and here.  We spent most of our day in Athens at the Acropolis (of course!) and the Acropolis museum.  How 'bout a closeup of my stamped title:

Ya know, it took me a long time to use the Empire Alphabet after I first bought it, but I can't seem to get enough of it lately.  And how about that owl?!  It's from a set called Magical & Mystical that I bought from the amazing JanTInk a few years ago, and this is the first time it's seen ink in my house.  (JanTInk is kinda a little famous in the stamping world, and I own stamps that used to belong to her.  I've also met her IRL, she's really nice in person.)  Anyway, about that owl.  It's actually just part of the stamp:

It took me two tries to get just the owl to stamp *without* getting a ghost image of the moon, but lucky for me I decided to do the owl first rather than waiting until I had the entire title stamped out and then messed it up.    And then the second time I had to draw in a little bit where the tail isn't that well defined on the original stamp, but I thought it ended up looking okay in the end.  So why an owl?  Well, most of the temples on the Acropolis are connected to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and the owl is her sacred bird.  Lots of gods had sacred animals or birds, like Hera is associated with peacocks for example.  But anyway, I had to put an owl on there for Athena.

Oh hey, I said two layouts, didn't I?

I couldn't fit all the pictures onto just one layout :)  The three pics on the bottom half of the right page are all from the Acropolis museum; on the left are the best guess we have at what the Parthenon's pediment sculptures looked like before they got blowed up and otherwise damaged, and in the bottom right corner is a pic of me with one of the real caryatids from the Erechtheium; the ones actually out on the Acropolis are replicas and the real ones are safe and protected in the museum.

There's my color combination for the two layouts:  Groovy Guava, River Rock, Brilliant Blue (for the bright blue sky in all the pics), Chocolate Chip, and Very Vanilla.

I didn't realize until I started these pages just how close the soon-to-retire In Color Crisp Cantaloupe is to the long-retired In Color Groovy Guava.  Really, they're like a half a shade off of each other.  They do seem to have a tiny problem of recycling very similar colors.  Now we just need to revisit some of the purples...

Cheers, peeps!

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Empire Alphabet, Magical & Mystical, Mosaic Madness
Ink:  River Rock, Chocolate Chip, Pacific Point
Paper:  Groovy Guava, Chocolate Chip, Pacific Point, Very Vanilla, Brocade Background DSP
Accessories:  Artisan Label punch, Mosaic punch, circle punch