Creating an organic landscape is always a labour intensive and time consuming process. It starts with preparing the composition and sketching it onto the canvas just so I have a general idea of where to lay my various texture and gel mediums. Once this is completed the layering and drying process starts and only when that is done can I begin painting over the texturing. Because this layering stage of the process involves so much time I usually wait till I have a few commission orders for the organic landscapes and then I do a few extras for MORE Cafe as well as stock up on the miniatures which I keep in my studio as they tend to sell to a tourist market or people buying them for gifts to give to friends, visiting family or people leaving the country after time spent working in the Emirates.

Once the sketching and compositional planning is complete the next stage of work begins. This part is usually sticky and very messy and ends up covering not only the canvas but the floor, myself and any hapless passerby who pops into the studio to see what I am up to. The cleaning up can often take as long as the texturing itself especially when I have to take a scraper to the floor tiles to scrape of blobs of textured sand or modeling cement that have landed there. Each layer needs time to dry so I will for instance first layer the modeling cement on all the canvasses and wait a day or two for that to dry depending on the thickness of the application and whether it is summer or winter. This time of year I don’t need more than 24 hours between layers. Next I might add a textured sand gel and so on, and so on, slowly building up the different layers of textures till I am satisfied. Some canvasses might only have three different layers others will have as many as 6 different textures.

At the moment I am working on 13 canvasses simultaneously each one different. Some have very specific requirements from clients and others are left up to me. I don’t have enough space in my studio to dry all my canvasses so I have spread myself out a bit and have gone as far as occupying the dining room table for the next 48 hours or so so you can imagine my horror when my husband suggested inviting friends from Sharjah for dinner! Fortunately they have insisted we visit them so they have been spared sharing the dining room table with my canvasses……

Friends always have wonderful suggestions as to what to do with my art, often driven from me peppering them with ideas I have or a need to resolve their own issues as to where to buy hand made items like tea trays and greeting cards. I have decided to try a few more crafty ideas and see where it takes us. Yesterday I laid some preparation for creating greeting cards, but to be honest the texturing and layering process is so laborious and it has to be done on such heavy cotton paper to carry the various textured layers I am not sure it is going to be worth it from a time point of view or how practical it will be as an actual greeting card. I have been giving it some thought and I think I will have to limit the amount of layers and use the less heavy textures. I will also need to work on pre stretched water colour blocks so the paper doesn’t buckle and warp.

The trays I should be able to source from Ikea and I will just need to find where to get the epoxy that creates the bright glossy covering over the decoupage trays one sees in so many stores. I did a little decoupage in my misspent youth so I know its available, I am just not sure if its available here in the UAE……