Quilled Cyclamens

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!”