I love creating for Valentine’s Day as you can really personalise your project.

Every year I make a Valentine’s Heart for my husband, It’s a chance to play with colours and techniques. Last year I focused on colours and played with Acrylic Inks and Paints.

This year I wanted to look at composition and putting together embellishments. I wasn’t to bothered about the materials so I used, a mixture of clay, wood, MDF and metal. I was more interested in shapes, which I split into three groups

• Embellishments which have meaning, including balloons, musical notes, guitars and letters.
• Generic Valentine’s symbols including hearts and flowers.
• A reoccurring element, which I use to pull the design together, in this case cogs. This helps give depth to your project and create visual triangles without overwhelming the design

I used Red Powertex and moved the elements around the heart so the design changed several times. There is a coat of Easy Structure under the embellishments to add extra texture.

With just Powertex, you can’t see all the details, especially on the clay and metal embellishments. By using Pearl or Metallic pigments you can really show the depth as the light reflects off the mica in the pigments.

To add further details i blended two pigments together. The secret to this is not to clean your brush in between colours and keeping adding more layers. The more layers you add, the softer the divide.

I always recommend that you take a photo before and after you add pigments so you can see the difference that they make to your project.

Look forward to see what you create.

Emma W