Valentines Venture

Hello 😊

Alongside working on some of my unfinished paintings (spurred on by all my investigations into beating creative block!) I have found myself making up a bunch of greetings cards this week.

I was quite enamoured with the fun technique I used to make the one for my friend last week, so when I was out with another friend who was shopping for a Valentines card and she was scoffing at the ridiculous price tag for what was quite frankly boring tat, I told her I’d make her one!

I started of plastering a piece of card with red, pink and purple, but hated how garish it looked, so chose an ‘off primary’ palette which I thought was quite pleasing when I started swirling and doodling with it and I liked how the colours blended together where they overlapped.

I then added some copper paint and glittery accents and when it was all dry I got a square die cutter and hovered over it, using it as a viewfinder and moving around until I found a section that I thought worked well.

I painted a piece of cardboard toastie packaging I’d saved with the same red, highlighted the wavy crinkles with some copper paint and cut out heart shapes, then placed them on top to finish it off.

The lighting wasn’t great here and it looks a little yellower than it actually did.

I had quite a bit of the card leftover so got to work using it up on some more Valentines cards…

Then my children needed a last minute birthday card for their cousin, so I used the same technique and made this:

Here’s the sheet before I started chopping it up:

I love the fact that it doesn’t have to look perfect as a whole and the freedom it gives to just make marks and play with the paint.

So I made more…!

I thought I’d use the same technique to try and salvage a piece of art I’d been struggling with for a while. I had wanted to do a green piece on it, I seem to find greens difficult and wanted to challenge myself, but I really didn’t like what it had become, so painted over it. I thought it would work well with this method as it was on watercolour paper with other materials added on top, but mostly not too thickly, so I’d still be able to cut out some pieces.

Here it was in one of its earlier stages:

I didn’t take a photo of how it looked just before I covered it all up, but never mind because it was ugly! So, I still need to conquer green… Anyway here’s what I did to it. I used the same palette as for the Valentines cards.

I had a frame that I wanted to use so I had to find a section that worked well but that I could actually cut out without hitting any of the raised elements like the bits of zip, Washers and beads!

I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out. Once I’d cut it out I tweaked it a bit, adding a few little bits here and there, then signed it.

I’ll use the rest to make more cards, Mother’s day approaches!

Have a lovely week 😊