Christmas Whimsy

Christmas Eve is only 10 days away and I'm definitely getting into a festive mood. I was inspired to follow a tutorial by Tamara Laporte of Willowing Arts called A Christmas Whimsy. I pretty much copied her ice skating girl, but I'm hoping that by changing the colour scheme and composition I managed to make this project a little bit my own.

This is also my entry for the weekly challenge of Word of Inspiration Wednesday by the Kraafters Kommunity on Google Plus, where the inspirational word this week is ICE. 

I chose a flat canvas board for this piece. I completely covered it with dictionary pages and patterned paper as shown below. Most of it disappeared under the additional layers of crayons, paints and stamping, but it still gives a nice underlying texture peeking through in places.

Starting point: dictionary pages and patterned paper

With crayons, paint and collage pieces added

I drew the skating girl on 300 gsm watercolour paper and shaded her with water-soluble wax crayons, then cut her out and adhered to the background with gel medium. The houses and the birdie were cut from the same card. The trees are gelli prints and the image of the moon was printed on regular copy paper. I completed the layout with white outlines, doodling, stamping and glitter glue accents. I also dusted silver mica powders all over the page, which gives it a nice shimmer, though you will not see this in the photos.

It may sound like a quick project, but I actually spent quite a lot of time trying to get it right. I added the bird as an after-thought as there was too much empty space in that corner. The drawing of the girl took three attempts until I was reasonably happy with her. I tried a red/green Christmas colour scheme first (as in the tutorial) but it didn't seem to work for me. In the end I kept the colours to an icy blue/green/white and I quite like how it turned out. I hope you like it too! Here are the photos of the completed project: (Click on the photos to see them enlarged in gallery view.)