Summer into Autumn

Hello all!  In a bid to get back into the blogging habit (before I really dive in with - hopefully - weekly posts in 2027 following my Wanderlust journey), I'm here with a little post celebrating the autumn equinox - the midway point between the longest day and the shortest day.

I mean, I'm a couple of days late, but what's a couple of days between friends?!

The colour transition from summer to autumn is under way on the craft table, though the foliage in the countryside where we are is still mostly green.  (We sit in a bit of a micro-climate. Even just up the road in our nearest town, the trees are visibly further into autumn!)

But I've definitely been heading into the green golds and burnished oranges with these leafy prints prints, created with my PaperArtsy PS522 Foliage stencil...

You can watch the full process on the Words and Pictures YouTube channel. Just click below.

Summer into Autumn Leaf Prints

And you can also watch how I used a simple tab binding to join them into a small journal, still to be completed.

Tab Binding for Decorated Papers

Click the link just above if you'd like to watch the book-binding process over on YouTube.

There's a touch of autumnal melancholy to some of the lavender paintings here...

 

You won't believe how simple it is to paint these stems. I share the trick in this YouTube episode.

Shadow Painting Lavender Stems

The paints I used for most of the lavender are by Fuumuui - a gorgeous palette of Muted colours (which I bought for myself a while back) and a glowing Warm Terracotta set (which they kindly sent me as a gift after they saw what I did with the Muted ones!).

Watch some swatching and doodling with the Muted colours here.

Watch some swatching and doodling with the Warm Terracotta colours here.

If those look tempting to you, you can get 20% off your whole purchase at Fuumuui if you use my discount code "Alison" at checkout. (And I get a small percentage bonus - at no extra cost to you.)

And it simply wouldn't be Words and Pictures without some rusty blue and brown tags, now would it? I had a glorious time creating this triptych... and I hope you love them too. 

Again, the full process is over on YouTube if you're interested... first the backgrounds and then the tags themselves.

Watch the lifted and layered background process here.

Watch the tag trio being made here.

There you go... a little bit of a catch-up post to get me started on catching up! I do hope you are all surviving this apparently increasingly difficult world.  Creative delight seems to me to be an excellent counter-balance to all the dark nonsense of daily life at present... so I'm sticking with it.

Take care out there, and happy crafting, all!

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them.

Marcus Aurelius

I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

Hafez