Flower power

...or making order out of chaos. Well I've definitely been stepping outside my comfort zone on this artful journey. I love the artwork of Flora Bowley , and she does teach via workshops and online courses and although on my wish list they are out of my price range..however..I noticed on instagram she was doing a short online tutorial via Creative Bug, having looked into it, this was much more affordable so I signed up. I've already learned a lot and trusted to the process for several of the steps but ended up deviating along the way partly because Flora works on large canvasses and this just started as a play in my small journal. However I look forward to practicing her techniques more.

It's not giving the game away to say it involves the layering of colour and mark making. What I quickly realised was that it's difficult to make many different marks on such a small scale that won't just get lost, so the solution for me was to incorporate stencils and stamps. I went way overboard with detail because I knew I wanted to isolate some shapes with either black or white (another deviation) so that whatever area I picked there would be lots of pop.

I won't show the first few layers because they just look bleugh! You have to work through each one but for someone who at times embraces and appreciates CAS this final layer looks like all my fresco paints exploded on the page...and more! I even added some journalling.

I have to be honest it's like the most vibrant crazy masterboard I've ever seen...but I liked it. I may even have to create another in my journal just for fun.

Time to isolate. I wanted to create a repeat pattern for the new 'Pattern' challenge at PaperArtsy and thought about circles and larger flowers that would have shown more of the background off but I was torn in thinking if I left too much background it would still look chaotic. I opted for tracing around a Lin Brown flower stencil. I then used fresco paints in snowflake and nougat to block out the background colour.

Using white or pale paint always knocks back a background and although I loved the 'fresco' effect of painting on plaster it created, the jewel like tones of the flowers were disappearing (this is where I feel a larger flower may have worked better or I should have used black). I decided to emboss them to make them pop.

I added some scratchy lines around the petals and between the flowers to join them before adding a go to quote.

A good journey for me is one where in travelling from one place to another I learn along the way....I really enjoyed this art journey and I'm now eager to travel again. Thanks so much for stopping by and happy creating!