Autumn or Fall depending in where you live, has to be one of my favourite times of year. Wholly sweaters, boots and hats. Glorious forest walks through coloured leaves that take your breath away. Today’s make finds us somewhere in the forest where the red leaves fall and forest creatures sense the seasonal change.

The following stamps and stencils were used:

Red pine large

Red pine small

Reindeer small

Red leaves verse

Laurel stencil

The steps:

I liked the colour mix on this ink spray background. It was one of my inky scraps.One of the sprays contained mica which created a dark patch. I didn’t let this put me off. It could be fixed later.

This time to create the sun I painted a white circle using acrylic ink. White gesso or paint would also work. Some landscaping was added using dark pink ink and torn copy paper. The yellow at the top was also enhanced using yellow ink.

I decided to colour the sun using soft chalk pastels and darken around the edges of the top of the picture with green ink, graduating dark to light, the lightest nearer the sun. I also added a hill in the foreground and a white ring to the sun using a white gel pen and white pastel.

Next the trees were stamped. The background ones in dark green. I used the same torn copy paper to mask the foreground while stamping the trees. The foreground trees are darker with a few in paler pink scattered in between. The reindeer was stamped in black in the centre against the sun as the focus of the piece.

I stamped the wording along the right hand side of the picture, top and bottom.

I wanted to create the impression of falling leaves and achieved this by roughly doodling leaf shapes freehand using both water colour and paint pen to create a range of colour and tones. You could also use one of the many Lavinia stamps leaf stamps to achieve this.

The shadows under the reindeer were created using pastel pencils.

Paint pens added texture and interest in the centre. This gave the impression of dappled light and drew the colours in the picture together.

I decided to add some extra trees at the front.

I mounted the piece and added glitter.

However, I felt that the picture needed something extra so I very carefully added some stencilling trying not to place ink on the mount…oops!

I was happier with that. Aren’t autumn colours awesome! Such a beautiful time of year and perfect for fairyland too!

Till next time…

Lisa xx