Home Sweet Home by Gill Humphrey

This week I have deliberately returned to working with a 4" x 20" canvas to demonstrate how you can take a basic design (see Whoever is Happy post) and make it look completely different by altering your materials. I hope that this will encourage people to move from simply copying to adapting projects as a stepping stone for creating with no specific style as I think this is an important part of many creatives crafty journey but one that many find quite difficult to do.

 

To make the decorative background for my piece I painted on a layer of Cracking Primer. Once the primer had dried - it changes from white to clear and feels almost dry to touch I then used a palette knife to add White 3D Cracking Paste over the primed areas. By varying the thickness of the cracking paste you get a mixture of small and big cracks which adds to the interest in the background.  To highlight the cracks I then painted over a layer of Country Blue Lasur Gel. When working with this medium I suggest you work in sections as you can lift off the colour leaving it in the cracks whilst the gel is wet.

 

With in the Garden House there is a page that consists of collaged floral elements - I took this page and cut out the blocks before adding Vintage Photo Distress Oxide to the edges and then distressing them with the edge of a pair of scissors. Whilst I had the paper pad out I fussy cut the beautiful yellow flowers and then shaped them with my fingers to give them some dimension.

For this make I substituted the clay pieces in the original post for resin leaves taken from the Leaves and Pomegranade and Flowers moulds. To cover these I primed the resin with acrylic primer before painting with Advocado and Garden Green paints and let it dry throroughly. The leaves were then distressed with Vintage Patina Turquoise - simply paint on the gel then wipe off the surface leaving the colour in the recesses. I then added a little more Advocado paint using a dry brushing technique to highlight the veins in the leaves and finally lightly dry brushed with white gesso.

Whilst I had my resin out I cast my title piece from the Labels mould, primed it and then painted with Milk White paint before distressing with a custom blend of the turquoise and Dark Blue Vintage Patina and finally dry brushing with a little white gesso.

 

My next step was to arrange my composition - some images are adhered directly to the canvas and others lifted using the resin pieces to support and angle them - in places some cardboard was added for extra stability. the paper flowers were then tucked in place - with some cut in half and tucked poking out from the paper pieces. Finally I watered down some of the Advocado paint and added splashes.

 

 

 

If you look back through the blog there are a number of different projects made with garden house which I hope show case the versatility of a paper pad from the romantic range of papers and look forward to seeing your makes with it.