I had an idea I had been mulling over for weeks, ever since I saw a stack of wooden pieces outside Jeanne’s house.

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She let me take a piece to experiment on, and I developed the idea from a photo I saw on Instagram; just a simple hand lettered word on a piece of wood painted white and decorated with flowers.

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Like most of my creative ideas, it had plans of its own and didn’t turn out QUITE as I’d envisaged, but since it was an experiment I’m ok with that.

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I used some of the new things I learned doing Flower Crazy; I used watercolours instead of acrylic, and took a flower technique I learned from studying Alisa Burke’s flowers ~ splodge colour on, then use the shapes to draw in flowers ~ to decorate it.

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I wrote out ‘namaste’ {the word Jeanne chose; I figured I would give the finished piece to her since it was her wood :)} on a piece of paper first, to make sure it was the right size and look. Then I used carbon paper to transfer it to the gessoed and sanded wood.

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Then I doodled flowers all over the place, before finally going over the word with a waterproof black pen.

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I had envisioned much more white space, and that lettering could use some work, but it was my first one {and possibly my last ~ there are very few things I like to do repetitively} and Jeanne loved it, so I’m happy. 🙂

Namaste - hand painted wooden sign