Mixed Media Monthly Challange

I have taken another commission from a friend for her daughters 13th birthday but I also wanted to enter this piece into the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge blog. http://mixedmediamc.blogspot.in/2015/06/mixed-media-monthly-challenge-13-year.html?m=1

It wasn't difficult to cater my canvas to one of the options since there are so many this challenge but I have chosen 'Stamps' as my theme.

 

Here is the finished canvas and below a description of how I made it.

 

 

 

To begin with a painted random sections of the canvas in heavy white acrylic paint. The brief from my friend was to use blues and greens and nothing too girly so I then used liquid acrylics, some of which are metallic to blend with the white paint all over the canvas. Once I had let that dry I used an old credit card to apply gesso over the areas of white acrylic paint to give some dimension.

 

I don't have a stamp or stencil with random letters already in place so I used some of the individual letters from my stash and placed them in a random way on my stamp block. I used black archival ink to stamp the letters onto the background. Then I swapped the letters for numbers (in ascending order this time) and repeated the process. I used a bird stamp set by PaperCraft to stamp the round black stamp onto one of the gesso'd areas at the bottom, again using archival ink and a Faber Castell Big Brush Marker in Cobalt Turquoise to stamp a keyhole design onto various areas of the background.

 

Because I wanted a really clear image from my butterfly stamps I didn't stamp them directly onto the canvas as you cant guarantee you will always get the full design coming out. Instead I stamped them onto white tissue paper and then cut around them before gluing them on with matt gel medium. I also used black and white acrylic paint to stamp the circles on with the end of a toilet roll tube! I have recently bought three stencils which I was keen to use so I used a harlequin stencil and moulding paste to apply more texture around the corners and sides of the canvas. When it was dry I painted it with metallic green paint.

 

I used white card stock and black archival ink to stamp the quote (which was provided by my friend) with tiny Dove Craft letters before cutting them out and sticking down with gel medium. I then went around the outside with a black gel pen and then repeated to get a slightly thicker line so the quote would stand out more.

 

For the finishing touches I used some pearlescent paint to highlight some of the harlequin design; used a white posca paint marker to do some doodling around the edges and also highlight some of the edges of the harlequin diamonds; I used a small script stamp, Versamark ink and hologram embossing powder to stamp areas of my canvas so they glittered a bit more and finally used Dove Craft 3D Pearl Effects in black to add different sized dots to add a bit more dimension and draw attention of some areas of the canvas.