Winter Kisses by Gill Humphrey

I wonder how many of you love Christmas/Winter as much as I do. For me its the perfect opportunity to craft items for home decor and for gifts for love ones. My favourite colourways are usually icy blues/whites and silvers and of course there has to be a lot of sparkle. I think this piece sums up my winter season perfectly and I hope you like it too.

To make this project I constructed my beautiful That's Crafty! Snowflake Art Shrine using my go to glue That's Crafty! Multi Purpose Adhesive and left it to dry thoroughly before moving on to decorating it. 

Whilst my shrine was setting I stamped my Christmas Darling using Versafine Clair Nocturn Ink and then heat embossed with Wow Clear Embossing Powder. When creating focal images I make sure that I use good quality card stock that will withstand the addition of water - for this I used PaperArtsy Smooth Stamping Card 340 gsm as this makes the cut out images robust.  I am most definitely not an expert colourist but find that watercolour pens work well to give me the shading I like - my pens of choice are by Phil Martin of Sentimentally Yours rather than a watercolour palette but any watercolours could be used to create the same effect. When I was happy with my colouring I left the paper to dry and then fussy cut out the image I wanted.

To decorate my shrine I primed my MDF pieces with a  layer of That's Crafty! White Gesso, before adding a coat of That's Crafty! Light Blue Paint. Once this was dry I dry brushed That's Crafty! Mutlti Surface Paint in Interference Blue and Interference Gold.

I painted a Craftyboard wreath with the Interference paints to create a beautiful shimmer. 

In addition I painted some Craftyboard Snowflakes with That's Crafty! Multi Surface Paints in Light Blue, White and Lavender.

I chose my Craftyboard letters from Alphabet 1 and decorated these with Stickles which I also used to add dimensional dots to the front of my shrine and in and around the wreath and snowflakes.

Having created all my pieces the snowflakes were adhered to the back of the shrine and then the wreath added on top. The Christmas Darling image was added towards the bottom of the piece using Gel Medium shaping the piece gently with my hands to give it some dimension.

To finish my piece I added foliage and berries from my stash - these are readily available from floristry wholesalers or can be picked up economically when Christmas decorations go on sale post Christmas.