Egypt in teal and brown by Riikka Kovasin

Hello there! How are you today? It’s Riikka here to share a couple of projects with you. While I was looking for the inspiration for this month’s crafts I noticed how I had several brown sheets of papers unused. As a challenge for myself, I decided to go with those but to add colour to the mix and not to go with a vintage palette.

As the background is really strong chocolate brown, it need an opaque medium to cover and bring the colour. I didn’t want to go with my usual route of gesso + colour but instead grabbed some oil pastels and coloured the background using those. As it’s almost impossible to get splashes with the oil pastels (well, you can melt them by heat or a solvent) I chose to add the splashes with acrylic paint. Because you just can’t go without splashes, right?!

The layout I created is about something that has intrigued me since childhood. I’ve always been drawn to ancient Egypt and did even several school papers about the topic. The strong combo of the turquoise and brown made me think about scarabs, the sacred beetles. The photo I used in the layout is taken a couple of summers back in Berlin when we visited the Museum Island. The symbols scattered in the page are translated using an internet site and spell “Egypt”.

The other project I did is a card. I tried to have the same theme continuing, not only the colours and the background treatment. I chose the insect as my focal point because of the scarab idea I had with the layout. Both of the projects have same materials in use as well as layering techniques.