Canvas Board - teaching simple mixed media layers

Happy Mother's Day
........... to all you Mums, grandmothers, friends and aunties out there. I hope you have a wonderful day and hopefully receive some extra love from your precious ones. I have a Mother's Day project right at the end of this post, but first here's one I did for a workshop.

I often get asked to do a session for one of the local church groups and this time they wanted me to do something 'different' (ie not card making or gift bags, paper folding etc) so I suggested using paint and making a mixed media shabby canvas board - you know how I like these - so this is what I came up with. Bearing in mind we only had two hours there was a lot to do but I die-cut and prepped a bag for each of them so everything was at hand.

Using 5 x 7 canvas board

1. Paint canvas with gesso.

2. With palette knife randomly drag thin layer of acrylic paint and spritz with water, move the colour around a little bit - dry.

3. Repeat step 2 with another colour.

4. Repeat step 2 again with a third colour.

5. Lightly blend/daub over gesso with a distress tool and sponge.

6. Stencil over some coloured gesso and gently heat dry.

7. Add a little stamping for interest.

8. Dry brush a little of two of the other colours (not used with the gesso for stenciling) over the raised textures (I used white and yellow).

9. Adhere a small piece of scrunched cheesecloth.

10. Collect together papers, images, die-cuts, flowers etc......

11. ........ and assemble them onto the board. Note the vintage picture of the hare and chicks - I downloaded this from the internet as a free image and sized it to fit inside Tim's clock.

And do you like the butterfly? I loved stamping these, I used Tim's new Oxides - worn lipstick, peeked paint and iced spruce - and a little ordinary vintage photo distress.

So there we have it a pretty mixed media board for Easter.

And here's the one I made for Mother's day too.

Creating the same background (and keeping exactly the same colours) I then gathered different embellishments (mostly Tim Holtz products) -

For a complete change I edged everything with pumice stone rather than ground espresso or another of the brown DIs. - it's more subtle.

You can see where I slotted in the butterfly ..........

On this photo you can see I used a white pen to highlight the flowers a little. They had been stamped and cut from card dipped in worn lipstick  and spiced marmalade oxides with some fossilized amber DI added to it.

I lifted them using foam pads to create height and dimension .......

... and added some wildflowers 2 die-cuts as well as some shop bought mini blooms.

I added an easel and put it in the Packhouse.

It's lovely to have you stop by, thanks so much for the interest you show in my work, I really appreciate it.

Enjoy your day.

hugs Brenda xxx