This is a picture I made as a present for my mother. I
really like cyclamens, with their backwards facing flowers and spinging seeds, so I
wanted to make a picture featuring them. They were great fun to construct.
Gluing each flower together was the trickiest part, as I needed to stick all
five petal on simultaneously to be sure they’d all fit. As I wanted them on a slant as
well, this process felt like it would have gone much more easily if I had
around six hands ... you can see some of them slipped a little. I tell myself
they’re windblown!
I’m actually happiest with the cyclamen leaf – I think it
shows the quilling coils off well, and I enjoy the ways it’s constructed as a
discrete piece.
The roses and daisies were taken from my stock - I
periodically go through a ‘rose making’ or ‘daisy making’ phase where I spend a
few hours a day for a week or so making them in a production line, so I can
pull them out as needed.
The background is water soluble oils. I generally like using
these, as they have the benefits of oils – slow drying, easy layering and the
high gloss finish – without the really noxious fumes. This time however I was
pushing it timewise. I always forget they take weeks to dry completely, not
just a few days, and ended up trying to stick quilled paper onto slightly damp
paint – not to mention giving a gift with a strict –“don’t touch – the paint’s
still wet!”
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