When Painting Becomes Therapy – with video by Laura

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Hey guys, Laura back with another project using  the Secret Garden kit here.

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Lisa has included a little pot of paint in this month’s box and added a suggestion that we paint some leaves.  I was having a meh day and this was exactly what I needed.

Painting is something that is very therapeutic for me, especially repetitive painting.  I spent some time painting leaves and sprigs with varying amounts of water and pigment, using gentle pressure on the bristles to create the curved shapes. I encouraged the blooms and watermarks by adding extra paint or water to leaves when they were half dry.  For me this is a fab no-pressure get-lost-in-the-moment kind of activity.

When I’d filled up the paper I had a little puddle of paint left on my desk so I smooshed a gessoed sheet of book paper in it.  I used this as a base to build up a background allowing layers to dry (or more accurately speeding up the drying with my heat gun) before adding more colour on top.  I finished off with splatters of paint and water and set it aside to do its own thing and fully dry.

I fussy cut all of my leaf sprigs which again is quite a meditative and therapeutic thing to do.  Once my background was dry I crumpled it up and added some white sewing around the edge.   I layered it on to some green card arranged the leaves to the left of the page.  As I said, I was having a meh day so I journalled my heart out in tiny barely decipherable writing (always worried someone will read what I’ve written!) on a long strip of paper, folded it up and tucked it in a glassine bag.  I added a few sentiment snippets on to the bag that went with the way I was feeling.  One side was the frustration, one side was the goal of being free.  I attached it to the page with the copper heart paperclip, making sure the frustrated side was facing down.

Having kept everything very monochromatic until now I suddenly felt the need to add a touch of another colour.  A couple of lilac-y butterflies from the sticker sheet were just what it needed.  To finish off, you guessed it, I added some sequins from my stash.  I pulled out some coppery toned flat sequins to echo the paperclip and some purple cupped sequins to go with the butterflies.  As I was looking through my collection some large iridescent white sequins also caught my eye so I dotted a few of them around the page too.

 There’s a process video for you here too.

Thanks