Craftberry Bush

Playing with shadows…an easy painting techinique

Fall, Halloween & Thanksgiving Crafts· painting· tutorial

Hello my sweet friends!  I hope you had a great weekend.  If you follow along this journey, you’ll know that hubby was away on a business trip, from which he came back late Saturday.  Needless to say, we spent all day Sunday catching up and telling each other how much we missed one another…
Him being away was harder than I thought it would be and gave me a true appreciation for wives of servicemen who endure months and months of single parenthood.  You are also the heroes in the story. God bless you! 

Today, I want to share a super easy painting technique that requires very little artistic know how. 

Did you ever draw the silhouette of your profile in school using a projector?  Well, I thought it would be a good idea to use the same technique to draw the silhouette of a branch in order to simulate a drawing of a tree.

1. Place a light behind the subject you will be tracing (closer gives you a smaller and crisper tracing area; further away will give you a bigger and more unfocused image)
2. Using a pencil, lightly trace the outline of the shadow  
3. With a fine tip brush, paint over your pencil lines with desired paint colour


Perfect for a Halloween vignette 
If you are like me and don’t really decorate for Halloween, how about the silhouette of a leafy branch?

Using the same technique, except this time the light was shining from above (I used the light of our pot lights on the ceiling)

 I love the dark shadows against the white…
I painted some of the leaves yellow, black and
some gray just to show you various options.


So there you go, a quick and easy way to dress up a wall or fire place.  I used an inexpensive foam board, so this can easily be changed from season to season.  But if you want a more permanent picture, you can use a canvas or even paint it right onto the wall …that’s commitment! 

Well friends, as usual, I want to thank you for coming to visit…I appreciate your company.
Have a great day! 

much love,
Lucy

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  1. Cute idea, Lu! I am glad your hubby got home and that all went well while he was gone. MyHero has never really traveled much for work so I,too, salute those women that hold down a household while their hubbies are gone.

    I don’t do much for Halloween either- but I do collect ideas for Halloween…but I LOVE all the FALL decor the best. This is a very sweet project here. xo Diana

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  5. Ooooooo, so good, so good! It reminds me of my son’s nursery. As my husband and I are not artistic, we took the Hundred Acre Wood Map from the Classic Pooh books, made transparency copies and projected them on the wall, then used your “paint in the shadow” technique. It turned out incredible. My son had it for 9 years, then wanted to paint over it. My husband nor I had the heart to paint over the Map, so my dad was good enough to do it for us. Thanks, Dad!

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  16. I am so glad I found my way to your blog. You are such a talented young lady and so generous in sharing your talent. I’m my worst critic for anything I make, never feel like it’s good enough. So impressed with all your projects I’ve seen so far. I’ll be back many times and am a new subscriber. It’s such joy and inspiration for me to see all the incredible talent online, to me it’s very heartening that so many awesome talented young women like yourself are crafting in one way or another.

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  20. Love reading your blog… downloading a few of your free printables, thank you btw… you’ve made some lovely things, I enjoy reading about your days.

    Reply

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