I am blessed to live in a home surrounded by a beautiful natural setting. I love to walk my dog through the woods and apple orchard and collect natural treasures that we find. During certain times of the year, the wild turkeys are very prolific around here, as are deer and other wildlife. On our walks I often come across the most amazing array of feathers from the many different birds. I’ve kept a stash of a lot of them for ages, and realized that they really are the perfect fall accent for my artwork.

The Crafter’s Workshop provided me with some product to create this project. The opinions I share are solely my own.

I was feeling really inspired by the falling leaves and their textures, the color palette of late summer merging with fall colors, and the amazing array of nature I see daily. To capture the essence of this, I wanted to use a combination of bright and fall colors, and one of my favorite products to use is our incredible ColorSparx powders. I laid down the 12″ TCW947 Beaded Mandala stencil and sprinkled a rainbow of the colors in the desired shades over the top.

I then used our Spritz bottle to lightly spray water over the top of the stencil and ColorSparx powders. This is one of my favorite ways to create a colorful background easily, and I use this technique quite often for its absolutely stunning results, as shown in the following image.

Another fun thing to do with this technique is to then take the wet stencil and flip the dirty side of the stencil over onto another clean sheet of watercolor paper to remove the remaining colorsparx off the stencil and onto the paper. This can give you a fabulous ghost print, making two prints for the one use of the stencil! If you’re in a hurry, you can even leave it on the paper to dry and come back later. For the background of this artwork, I used a background using this technique and the same stencil in the same colors, as shown in the following image.

Next, using Tim Holtz leaf dies by Sizzix, I cut the first sheet of the 12″ TCW947 Beaded Mandala stencil watercolor paper into multiple leaf shapes to use for the wreath. This is so much easier than trying to paint individual leaves! And just look at the cool effects on each of these leaves (the top left and bottom right leaves are my favorites). I just love the effects the ColorSparx powders create in addition to the stencil marks and spray water marks. I could spend all day making ColorSparx papers!

Using TCW9011 Matte Gel Medium, I attached the die cut leaves over the turkey feathers to build the wreath shape. Do you ever have a few leftovers from other projects that you just simply cannot bear to part with because you like them so much? Me too! That’s what I used next. I attached some leftover faux botanical hydrangea petals and green leaves to the inside of the wreath shape (to help make the ColorSparx die cut leaves really stand out!).

And lastly, I filled in the center of the wreath using additional faux botanical petals and wooden beads for a pop of color in the center. Voila – the wreath is now complete!

Michaela Butterworth
The Crafter’s Workshop Design Team Member

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