Encore - To every season...

Encore Posts

While I'm away, there are some scheduled posts with new creations coming your way, but I'm also taking the chance to do some catching up here at Words and Pictures.   Projects which made their first appearances elsewhere for Design Team duties or Guest Designer opportunities, but which only had a sneak peek here, are being gathered together in the pages of my virtual scrapbook.  I'm calling them "Encore" posts and they're formatted differently (all the way down the centre), so you can spot them easily.

Please don't feel that you have to comment all over again!

This is a project from February 2014, when I was one of Darcy's wingmen for the PaperArtsy new releases that year.  This is one of the samples I created for display on the PaperArtsy show stands as well as on the PaperArtsy blog, and this is what I wrote back then...

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Hello all!  I'm here with a project using Darcy's fabulous new stamps.  They're not in my usual style, but I really had fun with this one!  I started out with just one tag in mind, but before I knew it there were four seasonal variations in front of me.

I started with crackled backgrounds: French Roast underneath, then a layer of Crackle Glaze and then Nougat over the top, with the Crackle Glaze doing its usual magic.  I stamped the trees in Potting Soil Archival and clear embossed them, so that they would hold their own whatever I put over the top.  I used one of the lovely borders to create my landscape so the trees had somewhere to sit.

I applied my sky (mainly done with washes of Ice Blue, Sky and a hint of Beach Hut in the mix in summer) and grass colours mainly with a natural sponge, blending darker colours over the lighter ones from the edges to create layers and depth.

In Spring, there's just a light sponging of Limelight and Hey Pesto for the new leaf growth, and there's just a touch of Nougat to highlight the tree blossom.  Adorable little spring buds are popping up around the foot of the tree.

In Summer, the flowers have bloomed beautifully - with Nougat and Beach Hut "petals", and the grasses are growing wild and free.

Up in the tree, the blossoms have given way to big bold leaves, now darkening with some added Hyde Park for that rich fertile green of summer.

Come Autumn and those same leaves are turning to Autumn Fire mingled with Hey Pesto, and there are glossy Cinnamon conkers in the tree (no idea what species this is!).  The mushrooms sprouting from between the tree roots have variations on the same colour tones, while the grasses are also on the turn.  I stamped the stems of the flowers upside down to get some extra grassy texture.

By Winter, everything else has faded away and the bare boughs of the tree are revealed in stark beauty against the wintry Antarctic sky.

The words are stamped on a strip cut from my first tag which hadn't had the tree embossed and so all went belly up when I tried to restamp the tree over the top and missed my mark.  Still, that gave me a lovely background for the sentiment on the finished project!

All mounted on corrugated cardboard (of course!), and some natural raffia toppings... 

and there you have it.

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I know we're hopping around a lot, rather than working through these Encores sequentially, but I've been really enjoying the process of excavating them from my Drafts folder.  (When I have something to post somewhere else, I now always create it here at Words and Pictures and copy it over, so that I have a record here.)  It's fun seeing projects which I'd pretty much forgotten about.  I hope you're enjoying a few trips down memory lane too - or brand new stuff if you're new to Words and Pictures!  Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I'll see you again soon.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana