Celebrate life, joy, laughter, love, family, friends

This was one of my most fun projects yet. I was nervous about doing this because I have no talent for painting, but this was more like playing with mixed media, not really sitting down to paint a picture. I used gesso, acrylics, inks, gelatos, stickers, stamping, dies, stencils, stucco-like media and sprays.

I started by gessoing over an old 9"x12" canvas. It took about 3 coats to cover the old painting.

To get the various colored background I used makeup sponges to dab on Daler-Rowney inks and used my fingers to smoodge around gelatos.

I took a home-made stencil and sprayed them with Dylusions ink spray.

When that was dry I used a store-bought stencil with a stucco-like Martha Stewart product. The neat thing was that it started out white, but as it set it absorbed the colors that were underneath. It was an unexpected, wonderful surprise.

My handwriting isn't the greatest, and the surface was too uneven to stamp words, so I chose to use word stickers. The colorful ones are cushiony-sparkly and the others are plain chipboard. I also used a word stamp and a few pieces of tissue paper to add more texture to the background.

The ruffle was made by spritzing and inking paper lace with matching colors. It was tucked up under the dress with some Glossy Accents for glue and lightly highlighted with Stickles. See my previous post on how I made the Julie Nutting doll.

The branch is a Tim Holtz die (with bird removed). The flowers were cut with a flower die from inked scrap paper from a previous project. I layered a couple of them and they all have a brad at the center.

I was glad to be able to use a Julie Nutting image I put together instead of tucking it away in the album I keep them in (because I don't know what else to do with them).

This is definitely not professional level art, but it's going to hang on the wall for my own self, so it's good enough for me. I'm ready to make another one, you should, too!