Three Days in a Secret Garden

I've spent three days getting over my airplane cold by playing in my studio. I have so much new stash from Paris, Ally Pally and Florida, I thought it would be nice to try and use some of it. I had this idea about making a canvas and creating a Secret Garden.....one of those pieces that you keep looking at and spotting things that you didn't see the first time around........one of those pieces that is all about the layers.

I started by tearing up five different types of patterned papers into squares and rectangles....all different sizes and glued them to my giant canvas with Claudine Hellmuth's Matt Medium. All the pieces overlapped lightly so you couldn't actually see any of the canvas. Next I used some Snowflake Fresco Finish paint which I watered down quite a bit and painted over the whole thing. When this was dry, I started adding layers by sponging paint and inks through some Crafters Workshop stencils and when this was dry, I decided it was time to test drive my new Donna Downey giant size Poppy stamp. This is a foam stamp so I applied more Snowflake paint, not watered down this time though, straight to the stamps with some Cut'n'Dry foam and stamped this image two or three times across my background.......I loved the effect in the white, thinking that it would look a bit like a resist....at least that was what I was hoping for. When dry, I watered down some Fresco Finish Beach Hut and Hey Pest paints and started adding layers of paint randomly over everything. Suddenly it felt like it was an underwater scene and no longer a secret garden.....hmmmm, what to do??? I know, this calls for Pumpkin Soup and Brown Shed I thinks to myself.....actually, I think I was really talking to myself out loud  and I may have even replied that it was a good idea so I figured let's give it a try. Suddenly it felt like a sunnier place so I kept going with lots of layers of these colours, drying between each layer otherwise you just get mud!

So then I made the main feature of the canvas which is one of those frame thingies from Tando Creative (an Ally Pally purchase from Coleman's Craft Warehouse). I cut a piece of Papererartsy's smoothy paper to fit the frame, coloured the background with Shabby Shutters and Broken China Distress Inks  and filled it up with some of Paperartsy's beautiful floral images. These were coloured with Prismacolor pencils. The frame was painted Black first and then a layer of Hey Pesto which gave me a lovely, deep shade of green....right up my street! That butterfly at the top is also a Tando thingy and this was given the Paperartsy Crackle Glaze treatment before layering other colours of Fresc paint on top.....really like how this turned out, a little bit of script always works well as a finishing touch.

The rest of the canvas was filled with all sorts of other things that I love, Paperartsy's Grunge Flower Die cut flowers, Prima flowers, I've got brass charms, metal that has been die cut and embossed, an acetate die cut and stamped birdcage, an Ice Resin embellie that I made some time ago. It's a good way to use up all those odds and ends.

There is some of my new stuff too....a new flower die, a flourish die, some of Tim's new Ideaology, some Vintage blanks....all sorts.....I had a lovely time making this and actually forgot that I wasn't feeling very well for a while!

So I do hope your Bank Holiday weekend has been a good one. Am off to find something for dinner.
Lin