- May 20, 2017

Mixed Media Art Canvas for our Living Room

mixed media art canvas scrapiniec scrapunlimited

Hi everyone, today I have something totally different for you all! This week I finished my very first bigger mixed media art work (“bigger” like bigger then a card!) and I wanted to show you what I made and how I made it. Keep in mind that this is just my first mixed media art canvas, I’m no expert, I watched a couple of You-tube video’s on how others proceed and then got started myself. What I most and for all learned from the video’s is that contrast is important and also building layers, so I tried to stick to that.

When I make a card I have a fairly good idea from the start what my card might look like but with this and working with all the different layers it was a little harder to see where I was going. I love the end result though!

This art piece, or rather the five art pieces together fit in my living room nicely. The funny part was that in every stage my boyfriend told me that he felt it was finished now, “it’s ready now, right?” and I time and time again told him “nope, not yet” until I had the feeling I was done working the canvases!

Warning: this is a very long and picture heavy post (the black tiles in the pictures is where the canvases lay on the floor, the white background is where they hang on the wall)!

I started with the idea that I wanted to use some of my stash stuff that I have laying around for a couple of years now. Amongst that were a couple of canvasses in different sizes so I decided to make a sort of collage with a couple of different sized canvasses: the biggest canvas is 30 x 30 centimetres, 3 are 20 x 20 centimetres and one is 10 x 10 centimetres. I thought about what I wanted my end result to look like (the separate pieces needed to work together to become one unity) and also where I wanted to concentrate the most important parts. Besides that my boyfriend also had to like what I was making (it is also his living room after all ......) so I did not only wanted to use flowers and butterflies but also buttons and gears and that kind of stuff. To make this art work part of our living room I wanted to use the colours that are already present in my living room so that’s why I choose turquoise and rose gold/copper and warm dark brown as my main colours to work with.

I also learned from watching the video’s that it’s important to have a vocal point to catch attention. When watching all these video’s two brands that make chip boards were popping up regularly: one is Dusty Attic and the other is Scrapiniec, in the end I choose for Scrapiniec (mainly because it’s sold in the same web shop where I wanted to buy my bronze items). They have gorgeous chip boards and one of them is this saying: “Always follow your Dreams” that I loved instantly. I also used a couple of their other chip boards (mentioned below) and bronze items from a Dutch online shop called Scrap-Unlimited.nl (mentioned below) and of course items from my stash (paper flowers, buttons, sea shells, wooden characters, modelling paste, Mod Podge and some paint).

Altering these canvasses was a very slow process (it took me about two weeks over a one/one and a half month period of time) but it was a lot of fun to do and totally different from making a card. There were a couple of ugly stages but by keeping working the canvasses until I liked it, and learning by doing, in the end it turned out okay. So, let’s get started!

Step 1:

- Apply white gesso over blanc canvas;

- Adhere pieces of patterned paper with Mod Podge to canvas (on places where I wasn’t planning on putting modelling paste);

- Adhere crinkled tissue paper (white in my case, so you don’t see that in the first picture) to the canvas with Mod Podge;

- Adhere ribbed card stock to canvas wit Mod Podge (on places where I wanted to start creating more layers).

Can you tell that I’m a control freak? I wanted to plan everything out to make it look nice and give myself the feeling that I knew what I was doing ...... ;-)

Step 2:

- Apply watered down gesso over places where I put patterned paper and regular gesso over the rest;

- I used two different stencils (Tim Holtz “Flourish” and That Special Touch “Moroccan”) and some modelling paste to create extra interest on my canvases. I also used the same stencils and modelling paste on the sides of the canvasses;

- Then I painted some pieces on the canvasses with dark brown and some terra cotta red (I used paints I already had: Van Eyck Acrylic Paint: “Red Ochre” and “Burnt Umber”, they are cheap paints from my local craft store) I also used these paints on the sides of the canvases;

- Next I put Crackle Medium over these coloured pieces and over the patterned paper.

Step 3:

- I bought a tube of Winsor & Newton “Deep Turquoise” Acrylic Paint that is about the colour I have on my living room walls. I made a mixture of white acrylic paint and this deep turquoise (not pastel but not too dark either) and put that over the crackle medium and the places where I put patterned paper. Remember that I put crackle medium over these spots in Step 2, so now it started to crackle a little and you could see the contrasting colours underneath. I also applied the turquoise paint, straight from the tube, over the rest of the canvasses. I found this was one of the more ugly stages because the crackle wasn’t really working the way I imagened and the first layer of turquoise didn’t look what I had in mind, but after figuring out what exactly I didn’t like, and by working on a second layer of turquoise paint I started liking everything again;

- Next I applied a little of the dark brown paint I used before over the dark turquoise parts to create a more vintage look;

- Then I applied some Reeves “Copper” metallic acrylic paint over the modelling paste parts and the ribbed card stock to create highlights;

- In this step I also put on some splatters with white watered down acrylic paint.

Step 4:

Now it starts to look really nice I feel: I made a design on my canvasses with all the little goodies from my stash and what I bought at Scrap-Unlimited.nl and when I was happy adhered them with Amsterdam “Extra Heavy Gel Medium”, in the Gloss finish, that I bought from an art supply store (I first thought about adhering everything with a hot glue gun but after searching the internet I was a little afraid that the metal items and the sea shells would fell off after some time so I decided to go with the real stuff).

From Scrapiniec I used:

- Park Avenue Borders, style 3;

- Doily Lace Medium;

- Doily Lace Large;

- Always follow your Dreams;

- Gears;

- Rectangle.

From Scrap-Unlimited.nl (where I also bought the Scrapiniec items) I used the following bronze items:

- 2 Flowers with Leaf, style 2;

- 8 Gears;

- 3 Butterflies;

- 4 Circles;

Step 5:

Paint everything in the desired colours (I did not put gesso over everything before I used the coloured paints, mainly because I wanted to keep the metal parts as much the way they were). I guess that when I would have used sprays instead of acrylic paints I would have put on gesso in this stage first before putting on the sprays. Because I used acrylic paints I didn’t felt the need for that. I painted some elements Burnt Umber, some Red Ochre, some white (some of the flowers and the sea shells) , some dark turquoise. Again, this was an ugly stage, to me it looked real bad and I almost gave up because I didn’t really knew how to fix things. But I kept layering paint with white, brown, copper, light turquoise (white mixed with deep turquoise) en deep turquoise until I was happy. This step took me the longest time to get where I wanted.

I also painted a few of Pretty Pink Posh’ “Clear Droplets” and glued them on the metal flowers (in the heart) and put on some more white splatters.

Step 6:

Finally I was happy with the painting and got to do the finishing touches. This was one of my favourite parts!

- I don’t own a satin varnish so I used some of the crackle medium (which has a satin finish and I wasn’t planning on putting anything over it) over the butterflies and the hearts of the metal flowers;

- I added pearls (beads I had left from my jewellery making period), other smaller beads (with a rose gold/copper finish) and some Pretty Pink Posh “Sparkling Clear” sequins in different sizes on the canvasses with Glossy Accents.

And this is what the final project looks like, hanging on the wall (and it looks even better in real life):

Overview (it was a little hard to get good pictures, you don’t really see the shine from the copper paint in the pictures but in real life it looks gorgeous, in the pictures it looks more like a dull rust colour I feel)

And here are some final pictures with more details per canvas:

Canvas 1