Art Canvas

In December I went to my upline's Demonstrator Christmas party and a highlight of this great event is the gift exchange. It's one of those where you draw numbers and get to steal or open a new one. I came away with a fabulous present, a set of four cubes decorated beautifully. I didn't manage to get a picture of them before I gave them away today at my stamp club Christmas party as a prize for the Christmas trivia game. They were beautiful though, all done in old olive, real red, and chocolate chip, very crisp and clean and stylish.

Here's the project I made for the exchange, an embellished art canvas. I started with one that was 8x8 and it came already gessoed. I had planned to make a 12x12 one but they weren't on sale, and this one was, so I went with this one! I had a vision in my head of soft creams and blues and different textures and for once it turned out like the vision in my head! (Usually it's my head that's soft and I'm blue...)
I started by painting about four different shades of cream and taupe and blue on the canvas, using some acrylic paint we had on hand from our plywood cutout Christmas carollers. (Yes, we are a plywood cutout kind of family... in my defence may I say that we also have some original -non-plywood-based art in our house?) Once the background was painted, I made some papers, using the colours from the Bella Bleu designer paper pack as inspiration. I started with Very Vanilla paper and stamped on the Medallion and some images from the Boho Backgrounds set. I tore the edges and sponded them, and added in some layers of paper for interest. I also made some butterflies from vellum and cardstock, and ran some of them through the big shot using my texturz plates. I used some of the new shimmer paint on the butterflies, which adds a very elegant touch. A few halfback pearls from the pretties kit provided the finishing touches.
Some of the canvases I've seen on-line have the paper adhered with mod podge but I like the textured look better, so I used sticky strip. I hope it all doesn't peel off. The image in the frame is Stampin' Up's Statement of the Heart, which I thought was appropriate for the demonstrator event. You could use any nice quote here, or even a photo.

This was quite quick, all in all it only took me about an hour, not including drying time for the paint. I did the background painting the night before I made the rest of the project, displaying an uncharacteristic degree of forethought in a project.

Thanks for stopping by!