Bouquet - parchment lesson

Our March parchment lesson was last night and we had a dry colouring project to master.  I must confess that my heart sank a little as sometimes I find this discipline a little difficult but this time I was pleased.  It just needs the first few strokes to go right and somehow it falls into place. You place the blank parchment onto the outline drawing of the flowers etc and then colour the flowers directly over the pattern.  No outline itself is drawn on the parchment.   We also had a scan of the finished article to copy and a list of all those pencils that were used  by our Tutor in the making of the sample.  The whole project used about 18 different colour Faber Castell Polychromos pencils.  They all have to be kept incredibly sharp as you use very fine individiual strokes to build up the shape and colour. It takes a lot of concentration and tongue biting.
After the colouring we did some embossing to the flowers to add dimension and then we embossed the 'cellophane' wrap to the bouquet.  Some of this is done on the front as well as the back to again give the right feel to the shaping.  A real piece of cellophane is used when embossing on the front - between the picture and the embossing tool to prevent the parchment getting shiny.
I finished it off today using an oval decorative grid and stitching to the background with beads.  The card wrap is from Joanna Sheen's Jane Shasky Cd.