Somewhere over the Rainbow - reversed canvas by Julie Ann.

Hello Everyone! I must confess I'm a bit of a dreamer and something about the mists and the golden days of autumn inspire me to dream even more!

In this project I just followed my imagination. I combined my own little drawings printed on to ink jet shrinkable film, coloured with pastel crayons with a handful of beautiful Calico Craft Parts to evoke some of my childhood autumn dreams.

One of my favourite books and films as a little girl was 'The Wizard of Oz'. Just like Dorothy, I dreamed of a magical land 'over the rainbow'. As I've grown older, I think I've come to understand more fully what Dorothy means when she says, 'If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard...' Although Dorothy's adventures seem to take her to extraordinary places far from her familiar, everyday world she discovers ultimately that there is 'no place like home'.

 My first memorable home was my Grandma's Victorian 'semi' with its old-fashioned garden flowers: lupins, hollyhocks and - late in the summer - Michaelmas daisies and golden rod. I always hoped to catch a glimpse of fairies at the bottom of that garden and I once left out my dolls' house all night in the hope they would take up residence in it!

Maybe they've eventually found their home in my studio, after all these years and they're going to put on a miniature performance of 'The Wizard of Oz'.

If you're going to create The Wonderful World of Oz, you need a yellow brick road. I gesso'd the reverse of this mini chunky canvas and then pressed 3D gel medium through this stencil of bricks.

Eventually the gel medium will become completely transparent just giving a great 3D surface to work on.

I like to cover all the sides of the canvas. At this stage you can see how I've added craft tissue with dictionary definitions connected to travel and a poppy from the top layer of a napkin to the sides and painted the bricks.

Here is my little collection of hand drawn Oz characters, decorated and heat shrunk to 'fairy size'. They are about half their original size.

Do you remember how Dorothy's house is blown to Oz all the way from Kansas, landing on the Wicked Witch of the West? I used one of the tiny Calico Craft Parts house kits to create the house, decorating the walls with stamped images of butterflies...

and using some of the 3D gel medium for the bricks on the outside.

My yellow brick road is old and cracked with moss growing between the bricks. I used DecoArt Crackle over acrylic paint, emphasizing the cracks with slate coloured acrylic paint. I created the clouds by fixing muslin with heavy gel medium and applying light touches of paint when this was completely dry. As you can see my background was an impressionistic poppy field.

I used the tiny, MDF pieces from between Calico Craft Parts windows to stick my little people among the poppies and blackberries. This helps them to stand out from their background.

Some charcoal art sugar and touches of gilding wax helped provide the fairy production with a little bit of glitter! I mingled and mixed Calico vines and blackberry branches to create a frame.

I wanted to add different levels of interest to my canvas, so here are The Wicked Witch of the West's legs and feet protruding from under Dorothy's house. These beautiful Calico bees help to create a sense of the fairy performers' scale!

'Let the show begin!' Thank you for stopping by today and for stepping back in time with me, into my story-book canvas. Have a wonderful creative time until we meet again.

Calico Craft Parts Used
Sheet of MDF Bees and Beehives
Blackberry Bramble MDF Wood Shape
Floral Flourish MDF Wood Border
Wood Word Elements, Travel and Explorer
Framed Style MDF Cube House Kit
Sheet of Tiny MDF Doors and Windows