If you've been a reader of my blog, you know I love Hallowe'en. Sooner or later, I was obviously going to felt a skull, right? Of course!
My sister had given me some lovely, dyed pieces of felt that looked beautiful on their own so I wanted to use them in a way that would show them off. This was the perfect project!
The dyed felt pieces are from Etsy seller Steph's Crafty Bits. I cut the green and brown pieces to form the background and needle felted them to a plain piece of felt for stability.
Isn't the green lovely, it's a forest without having to add anything extra!
I printed a second copy of the image to cut out the skull as a template...
From natural white prefelt purchased from Saira at Fibrecraft, I cut out the skull shape...
and gently pulled away the eyes, etc..., as I needle felted it to the background.
A book on painting advised to always do the darkest parts first, so I did the darkest areas in black.
Using a Blue Faced Leicester fibre in shades of grey from The Spinning Spider, I filled in the dark spaces...
This took some time and trial and error, but it was amazing how the skull became more and more real! I used a little very pale yellow to highlight parts of the bone that got a little more light. Shadowing around the skull also helped.
Plus a little green on the teeth and chin and it was done!
Then the foreground: I liked the contrast of the little pink flowers so I added them in two shades with a few different colors of green.
Framing forced me to cut away quite a bit from the sides but I had a lovely 8 x 10 frame (no glass) that I wanted to use.
And it was done!
Wow, what a thrill! What a hush! This was at a level I didn't think I was quite ready for so I'm very pleased with the result. What a confidence booster!
