Raspberry Cream

Hay Fever at Halfland as I tinted this layer with red and brown to make a warm burnt brick color that looked more like raspberry fluff as it dried. I bought some deeper rich crimson arcylics (you knew it was Nova) to wash over the plaster layer, so that should darken it to my tastes.

After the walls of the cottage dried today, I brushed off most of the hay that was pressed into the wet plaster you see above. I plan to wash the deeper tints over it all and then perhaps wet them again after they dry with matte medium and hit it with fresh hay, as that somehow works for this setting. It hides the architectural flaws that the three layers of plaster couldn't and looks right for some reason. I did have the thought that maybe Old English Wattle and Daub might have actually come about for roughly the same reason, neither the old English nor I could make a straight attractive wall without filler.

I've been continuing to sort out how best to make the Tudor style miniature windows. At this point of trail and so many errors, it would be far easier to simply copper foil the pieces and soldier them as I was trying to avoid having to do initially. Now it looks easier, funny how that goes, eh? But the cost and scale of copper tape and soldier still puts me off the idea. I have toyed with painting paper tape, applying it to the panes, and then gluing hand-piped whips (in burnished browns) down directly without any spaces at all, as if soldiering. The samples I did like that indicate it may, at last, work.

Tomorrow I'm to fatten up the tree and papier mache it a bit and wash the walls.

"Skill to do comes of doing." --Emerson

"There is no solution. Seek it lovingly."