Howdy everyone! Carmen Medlin here, Signature Designer for The Crafter’s Workshop. I’ve got a tutorial for you today to make a foresty-fairy art piece featuring a baby photo. The baby happens to be my sweet little nephew, but you can put in any baby you know, heheh!

I am using my TCW 12×12 Whimsical Shrooms template design to put in some mushrooms as a place for the baby to lean against. I’m doing the outlines with this lovely metallic gold pen on black art paper.

Next, I’m painting in the main body of the mushrooms with gold acrylic paint. I need a few layers to make sure the black background is completely covered and the gold will be shiny.

I have cut around the figure of my nephew so I can fix him to the paper with rubber cement. It’s ok if the photo cuts off in places because I’m going to be covering it with foliage later. I also added some dots and details on and around the mushrooms with a white paint pen.

Now I’m adding the foliage with the same stencil. I love this stencil because you can build your own forest floor type scene with all the different elements in any way you choose! I dabbed in some green Silks acrylic paint with a makeup sponge, making sure to overlap some of the fern on top of the parts of the photo that cut off.

I need even more coverage over the edge of the photo, so I have added some lighter green folk art paint around the stenciled fern shapes to fill it out and make the foliage more opaque. To balance the composition I have added some curvy lines on the right to look like grass.

Next I’m adding a hawk moth from my 12×12 Graceful Moths template design using first a light colored pencil to do the outlines, then coloring it in with a copper metallic marker.

I decided I wanted my nephew to look like a little sprite, so I used a silver metallic pen to add in some little antennae and to freehand draw some little wings on his back. You could also easily use half of one of the moths to add the wings as an alternative method. I used the silver pen to outline the hawk moth also to give it more contrast against the black paper.
Lastly, using dark blue, leafy green and ochre colored pencils I did some shading on some of the fern leaves, grass and wings for some nice added detail.

All done, scanned in and ready to be given for a present!

Stencils used:
TCW578 12×12 Whimsical Shrooms

TCW580 12×12 Graceful Moths

Until next time….

Carmen Medlin, Signature Designer