A study in texture

I've been reading some stress management self help books recently to try and get some hints and tips on how to manage my time and workload and still enjoy life. One of the hints was to use your senses to distract you, to focus on something more calming, I suppose to find your happy place.

Making, seeing and touching art is one of my happy places, as is making and eating food and the quiet of early morning with just the birdsong.

Recently I've been using fabric and stitching again in my art along with texture paste, in this case Grunge Paste.  To create different layers and textures, smooth and rough, light and shade (there is probably some art therapy tick box I've just ticked there in that sentence in terms of the frenzied state of mind). 

I love the fact that texture / grunge paste is so smooth and silky looking in the tub, yet when you apply to something you can really rough it up to create a completely different look. As I said in a tweet a couple of weeks ago I wasn't aiming to pass smooth icing class 101!

I wanted to see if you could use embossing powder on dried texture / grunge paste to highlight the roughness so you could see the texture more, to pick out the lines I'd created with my palette knife .  It did and I also got the addition of a molten glass like look as well where there were large areas of embossing powder.

I really like what I've created here, it is such a tactile piece. I love the neutral brown base layer (Chocolate Pudding and French Roast and a smidge of Squid Ink in the corners) over the texture paste but I love even more the coppery tones created by the gold stitching, embossing powder, paint and twisted wire.

What I really want to do now is work on a much bigger canvas to create similar kinds of work in different colour schemes, um how big can I go?

Right another happy place for this morning - rugby. It's the Lions Second Test, it could be noisy!

hugs
jo
xx