Berberis landscape

Another must-make birthday card, this time for my brother. After running out of sheep and camper van digis I seem to have fallen into making arty landscapes for him. In 2019 I did an encaustic landscape, then last year I made one with alcohol inks. So what to do this year…

I’d made a note of Kim Herringe’s blog post describing how she uses a gelli plate to print mountain ranges after seeing it on Pinterest and decided that now was a good time to try it out. I liked the landscape I’d created, but I wanted to add something more. I had a look through my stencils in case there was something suitable there, but soon realised I would have to make something myself.

I wandered out to my little garden and cut a piece of the berberis growing there. After removing the tiny spikes, I tested using it directly on the gelli plate — I liked the resulting shapes but couldn’t get a clean enough impression.

So I made a stencil. I took a photo of another piece of berberis and used it as a guide for creating a natural looking plant outline in Affinity Designer. I used the finished design to cut a stencil from Duralar with my Cricut Maker. There’s one bit that needs tweaking — a leaf stem that’s a little too thin — and once I’ve done that I will share the cut file here on the blog.

I put my new stencil to good use and added the berberis to the landscape using the gelli plate again. I did add a bit of paint to the leaves with a brush just to even out the texture.

And once again I wanted to add a little bit more. In the end I went with adding some berries. I used a punch to cut the circles from a leftover piece of stiffened fabric and loosely gilded them. To match the gilding, I mounted the final work on a textured gold card base.