2021 Topic 8: Nature's Treasure with JOFY {by Kay Carley}

2021 Topic 8: Nature's Treasure

We love it when a designer uses another designer's products. It is super-interesting to see the outcome, and on this occasion, Kay Carley has used Jo's stamps to create a wonderful floral, buzzing summer scene. Her explanation of the process she uses to build those amazing garden layers is super helpful!
~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Kay with you today, and I'm here to share with you a decorated wooden hanging plaque that I created using JOFY stamps. With all the media coverage about bees at the moment I definitely wanted to create something involving these wonderful insects for my Natures Treasure project as we would be lost without our bees!

To go with the bees I chose to create a garden full of flowers for the bees to collect their pollen from. I've found that the trick to creating a pleasing, layered composition such as this, is to keep my colour palette quite contained, so although I have used quite a few different Frescos I've kept the colour palette to tones of greens, yellows and pinky/purples.

To begin my project I assembled three pastel colours of Fresco Chalk Acrylics to create a random background and chose a contrasting Fresco colour to stencil on top.

You can see that I kept quite an ethereal feel to how I applied my paint which was achieved by sponging (using a sponge wedge) rather than painting with a brush or brayering.

 

I also kept the stencilling soft as I didn't want any defined imagery at this stage - I just wanted subtle interest.

 

 

Next I wanted to create some foliage as a backdrop for my garden. It's important to get the backdrop right at this early stage, as it is quite hard to add it at a later date once all your imagery has been stamped and painted.

I chose just two colours of green for this and switched to using a No.8 round paintbrush. 

 

 

The secret to applying the paints to create this effect is to have a very wet paintbrush. If you don't have enough water you cannot get the two paints to mix and merge together to create this watercolour effect. Note that you can still see my original background peeping through. It's all about creating that depth early on.

 

 

Next up is to stamp your composition and have fun colouring it! I mainly used Fresco Chalk Acrylics for this but I did add some details using Polychromo pencils too. To sink the smaller flowers into the grass I only inked up a small amount of the stem. Once I got to the base of the panel I inked up slightly more of the stem to help with perspective.

You can see how I have layered up the imagery using a combination of JOFY stamps. Overlapping some imagery helps with creating depth to the scene. I also lightly stamped some wording into the background first using Ranger's Distress Ink (Picket Fence).

 

I chose two of Jo's stamp sets to create my scene with namely (JOFY26) and (JOFY30). (JOFY 26) contains both the little and big flowers thus allowing me to create lots of interest by dotting the smaller flowers all around in the grass. Whereas the larger flowers allowed me to create some depth and perspective when stamped in front of the beehive and each other. I also used a variety of Ranger Archival Ink to stamp my imagery namely (Leaf Green), (Olive) and (Jet Black).

 

To really frame the composition I needed to add some imagery around the sides of the panel so I delved into my stash of stencils to achieve this.

After stencilling leaves all around the panel I added some more of watered down Hyde Park in amongst those stencilled leaves to further help frame the picture.

 

You can see how I have purposely stencilled leaves over some of the flowers to help add that depth to the scene. 

 

Creating scenes like this does take a little bit of time but you can begin very simply by just overlapping a couple of images to create some depth. Perhaps try stamping an image and then stencilling something to slightly overlap part of your stamped image. The beauty of working with PaperArtsy's Fresco Chalk Acrylics is that many of the colours are opaque which makes it so easy to block out an image that is underneath, so no fiddly masking is then required! 

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.