A Nova Scotia artist is bringing attention to her work by putting a twist on her paintings. Marlana Crosby is the artist behind Out Of The Woods Studio in Yarmouth. She creates textured paintings using modelling paste instead of common paints. “I am very much a maker, I’m very creative, if I see something I like I’m like, ‘I will figure out a way to make this,’” Crosby said in an interview with CTV Your Morning Atlantic’s Brianne Foley. “So my husband and I were in Vancouver and they had this beautiful textured piece on the wall but it wasn’t all colourful, and I thought, ‘I want that in my house,’ and I looked at options and stuff and then I was just like, ‘I’m going to make it.’” Crosby says the process took a lot of trial and error, with some pieces taking around a year to complete. She says the texture of her art is what sets her apart. “They’re bright and they’re different. A lot of people will come up to me if I have them at a show or anything like that, they’ll ask me, ‘Can I touch it? I love that it looks 3D,’ and so I think because it looks like you can touch it and it has that texture to it, and it’s bright. I try to keep my colours vibrant,” she said. Crosby says she gets inspired by what she sees around her. “We’ll go for walks and I’ll see wildflowers and I’ll take pictures of things and that’s kind of where I get inspiration, then I go home and everything else doesn’t matter and I hone in.” Overall, Crosby says she’s most happy to see her customers enjoy her art. “A lot of people order from me and I have to ship it, and some people have made unboxing videos with their reactions, and seeing that always makes me so happy because I create art that I would want on my wall, so to know that somebody else would want it on theirs is just amazing.” For more Nova Scotia news, visit our dedicated provincial page
