Velvet Seed Head

 Although winter is pretty much over I'm still bursting with ideas for the Winter Garden series of work I've been doing - this is a large seed head that I found and I simply had to fill each seed pod hole with a little velvet cushion!  

I chose warm, wintery coloured velvets, silver micro beads to represent frost and I added some silver gilding paste around the edges and on the back of it.

I think I shall be putting Winter to one side soon - the garden is coming alive

and signs of winter are receding rapidly! 

The Resilience of the Winter Garden

This is a page from my sketchbook and it's still sitting on my desk open from when I photographed it early last week.  It's quite a busy piece and I wanted to show the resilience of the garden in winter, all that's going on that we don't see until spring arrives.

I used Grunge paste and glitter, gold leaf, beads and Glossy accents with micro beads.  I discovered that micro beads ping off the glue from the hot glue gun once it's cooled down!!  I'll be finding them around my studio for years to come!