Flower Fairies! Inspired by Liesbeth. at PaperArtsy.

Hello and Welcome. Thank you so much for dropping by! Last week was busy with Mum's 85th birthday and Kevin, our kitchen fitter friend turning up unexpectedly and actually started tearing down our old kitchen! Things are moving after quite a long hiatus! This is great but it means our shabby kitchen is just a little more chaotic! Ah, well it will have to get worse before it gets better. I was determined to play along with Liesbeth over at PaperArtsy here! She is so very inspirational and I love the way she uses Lynne Perrella's amazing stamps. I was really excited when I saw that she had been playing with the idea of a face at the centre of a flower; as I've played around with this idea myself. Just for fun last weekend I created this little canvas on the left. I decided to create two more inspired by some of Liesbeth's ideas and have a Fairy Trio!

I didn't exactly 'case' Liesbeth's original. The canvas was quite mini so it needed fewer background features if the focal image was to stand out. I wanted to include  some of the motifs from my first canvas. I had used stamped and painted Baby Wipes, which I used again, but I also included some of the new tissue from PaperArtsy.

Here you can see the size of the canvas. I used some of the tissue with script on it and some plain sheets and - there in the background - is my trusty dried-out Baby Wipe! I gave my two new surfaces a coat of PaperArtsy Antarctic. I wanted a very light blue to show through the translucents I planned to use.

Three stages! The first one, on the left is Antarctic with some tissue added. Here is a closer look. I rather like this one before the paint is added and I think I might re-visit this and create something in Black and White one day: that would be a first!

In my first canvas I created a clearing in the forest where a knight dreams that he sees his lady in the form of a flower. This one, I thought, would be a magical city rising from the mists, perhaps a fairy kingdom.

Here is my third canvas with some Translucent colour added. I used Chartreuse, Inky Pool, Hey Pesto and Zesty Zing and a little Beach Hut. I stencilled some leaves in Grunge Paste and in Beach Hut. The music notes are from Sara Nauman's Eclectica Collection and I used my favourite mini with its lovely Medieval script on both.

A Fairy Kingdom with its flowery Queen! She reminds me of the very majestic, Titania in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. You can see how the feathers have been misted over, but I loved that central one so much I didn't want to obscure it as much as the others. I used Liesbeth's idea of applying blobs of paint to card for my central image, but for this one I die cut my fairy from a PaperArtsy Eclectica flower die and applied some Frantage for extra texture. Liesbeth added interest with tiny cut outs from the sunflowers on the stamp. I went for butterflies punched out of what was left over from my stamping.

With the next canvas I had a go at creating my flower using those Lynne Perrella houses as Liesbeth did. I fixed the small flower at the centre with dimensional pads, keeping my petals flatter, although if I did another of these I might fix the petals more in the style of Liesbeth.

With all three canvasses I used Tim Holtz Garden Greens for foliage. I do have some chipboard PaperArtsy Eclectica stems, which are lovely and I can't wait to use them, but these canvasses were just too small!

As this is a canvas, I wanted to extend the decoration over onto the edges.

We've past Midsummer Night now, but with these fairy-sized canvasses, I was still dreaming in the enchanted wood - and no - I hadn't taken a bite out of that pretty little mushroom!

Thank you for stopping by today and Thank You, Liesbeth for providing such fabulous inspiration this week at PaperArtsy. If the canvasses had not been quite so tiny I might have added this lovely quote from the ending of Midsummer Night's Dream somewhere on them:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream...