Wanderlust: serenity flowers

The guest instructor for week two of the Wanderlust “floral” theme was Shawn Petite (website, Instagram, YouTube). I love Shawn’s work and regularly watch her YouTube videos, especially the Sunday Inspiration ones.

Lovely textured layers of collage papers, modelling paste and acrylic paint all come together to create a wonderfully weathered background for the flowers.

Shawn did provide some flowers to use, but I like to personalise pieces by using different images and colours. I find that creating an exact copy of any instructor’s work is deeply unsatisfying, which is why I don’t by art kits any more. And anyway, I have a decent amount of ephemera to choose from so it would be a shame not to use some of it.

And the ephemera does make the painting easier. Tracing the image onto tissue paper and gluing it down with acrylic medium means the paper disappears into the background and just leaves you with a neat outline to paint over. Adding charcoal shading around the edges gives a nice amount of depth to the images as well.

I was wary of using a palette knife to add the black in the corners and I very nearly skipped that part, expecting to just end up with solid black blobs, but I went for it and was impressed with how well it worked.

Class:

• Wanderlust 2019