2021 Topic 5 Find Your Vibe with Flower Scenes {by Kay Carley}

  2021 Topic 5: Find Your Vibe

Whilst wandering with Kay through her wonderful wildflower gardens, it's easy to see her vibe and how beautiful the resulting pieces are. With lots of tips for adding details to the stamped images and how to combine her older and newer sets to create depth, you'll soon be wiling the hours away creating bespoke cottage garden flower scenes.

~ Keren

Hi everyone, it's Kay with you today, and I'd like to share with you how I go about creating my flower scenes.

I have always really liked wildflower meadows and cottage style gardens so when I began designing my stamp range for PaperArtsy I had in mind that I would like to try and recreate those type of scenes using a combination of stamps and stencils to create a layered effect that would emulate a cottage garden.

Using this particular style of stamping and stenciling with PaperArtsy's chalk acrylic paints enables me to easily create this 'layered look' and nowadays it is always my 'go to' type of artwork as I think it gives a really effective result. It is something that you can definitely play around with, as you might choose only to use stamps (no stencils) to create your whole scene or perhaps just have one background layer instead of several.

For this project I have used some of my latest products with older stamps and stencils as most of my products have been designed to mix and match seamlessly with each other.

I just love how you can easily adapt this style of creating flower scenes depending on how much time you have, what finished result/composition you want to achieve, what size of project you are creating etc... It is just so versatile!

I began by creating my brushed background with several different green Frescos - namely Lichen, Zucchini, Hey Pesto and Winter Green. 

 

 

 

Next I stencilled my tall background flowers (PS060) very lightly with Winter Green before realigning and softly stencilling Snowflake to create the white heads. 

 

 

I then added layers of stamping (in green) using tall grasses from EKC17

 

 

Now its time for the and tall flowers from EKC45 before stamping my main flowers (EKC45) in black. 

 

 

To colour these flowers I used the matching stencil PS237 (which comes with full instructions).

 

 

 along with Snowflake, Lilac, Electric Violet, Key Lime, Hey Pesto and Winter Green Frescos.

After colouring the flowers using opaque paint you then want to stamp all the original detail of the image back. Therefore all my stamping and colouring of the main flowers take place within a stamping platform, enabling me to perfectly align the flower image to re-stamp the detail over the painted layers.

My next step was to paint the background flowers using Periwinkle, Southern Skies and Snowflake. Smaller flowers were stamped into the foreground (EM32) and painted with Candy Floss and Orchid. To add a bit of depth to all the flowers I added small amounts of a mauve pencil to the purple and blue flowers and pink pencil to the pink flowers.

 

To add further interest to my panel I used PS061 with Slimed and Gumboots Frescos at the top edges of the panel.

The picture above shows just how little of the mauve pencil I added to my main flowers but it makes such a difference to the overall vibrancy of them.

Whilst I was creating my main project I went ahead and painted and stamped a smaller panel with different coloured flowers so that you can see how this lends itself to small projects too!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post I am definitely in my 'comfort zone' when creating these layered scenes and I must admit that I very often work on a green background for them as then I can paint my main imagery with any colour I choose. But occasionally I will begin with a different coloured background however when I do this I already have in mind what colours I will be using for my flowers so that the background I'm beginning with will complement them.

I have quite a range of different flower stamp sets for PaperArtsy ranging from quite small, delicate flowers to much bigger and bolder flowers so whatever size of project you create you should be able to find something to suit!

I hope this has given you some inspiration :).

Love Kay x

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At this current time all of my teaching is being done online. You can find details of all of my past and current online workshops over on my Crafting with Kay Carley Facebook Group.