Spring Trio Canvas

Hello and welcome to Magpie Heaven!
 There have been some wonderful green and golden days since my last post and Suzanne over @ Paper Artsy has so far created projects brimming over with all the joys of spring - fresh colours, shiny things and flowers and butterflies! I really wanted to play along this week, but I was worried at first - I didn't have anything like the Hot Picks she used (memo to self: you need more Hot Picks!) Also I feared I lacked her bold confident touch!
I did have a canvas though so I said to myself, 'Why not adapt what you have?' Should I be talking to myself so much, I wonder? Magpie Heaven is a bit of a squeeze these days, as, along with my stash, there are the brood - one at Art College, the other come home to roost from university - and a long-suffering husband to fit in. I have to do my craft projects on a corner of the dining-room table. Here is my canvas battling it out with the pepper mill, place mats and a candelabra!

 I sponged the canvas with layers of Frescos: Ice blue, Sky, Mermaid, Haystack and Beach hut with, around the edges, Hyde Park with Zesty Zing and Limelight to suggest grasses. I then stamped on more leaves and grasses from an old set of clear stamps I have. I don't know where they came from, but they're so useful. I dabbed them with Hyde Park and made sure I sponged this off quickly. Here is the canvas before I had done very much to it. It's on my little potting table in the garden to get me in the mood for planting and springtime.

 I remember being taught the same sort of effect that Suzanne created with her cogs at a class years ago. I had great fun in the class, but then never used the technique because it didn't seem to fit in with my style. This time I had an idea brewing! I 'Versamarked' a piece of 'Smoothy' card, melted Verdi-gris and Copper embossing powders with my trusty heat gun and then inked up a Lynne Perrella coin stamp and stamped into the molten embossing powder. I didn't want to cover up the result, which looked to me like ancient coins you might stumble across in the grass so I just rubbed them with some Green Amber Treasure Gold and stuck them in the corners of my canvas. I think that was where the idea of 3 being the theme of this canvas was born - 3 coins, 3 leaves, 3 butterflies. I also rubbed on some Treasure Gold around the corners of the canvas.

On Lynne Perrella's website she describes going out with some colourful banners she had created and hanging them in the trees and this gave me an idea. I stamped these three LP images on Crackly tissue (what will become of me now this is no longer available?) with Versafine ink and painted them on the reverse side. I then used lots and lots of Satin Glaze to fix them and to make the colours on the canvas glow. I then finished off with my take on the butterflies. I embossed on acetate with the same powder mix I'd used for the coins and I used, instead of a die cut butterfly, a Stampington one from the 'Butterfly Girl' sheet. I then added some little leaves, stamped on Crackly and coloured on the reverse side with Limelight. I then drew on in black marker the strings attaching the banners to the trees and added some Old Gold to make them look like fine chains. When my daughter got home she at first thought they were windows so I hope they really do look like banners fluttering in the light spring breeze. What would it be like, I wonder, to come upon some Lynne Perrella banners glittering in the morning sun in some secluded dell?

Here is a full view of the finished canvas.

Here is a photo without the shadows of the garden plants! You can also see more clearly the strings from which the 'banners' are suspended.

Does anyone else ever have moments during a project when they think - help - this isn't going to work? I know I do and I was not very confident about this one because it was not quite like anything I've done before.

 By the time I had finished, the sky was beginning to darken behind the glass plate I painted so long ago the colour is wearing away now!  Although I did this at the end of a tiring day tutoring my English students (Grrr - springtime is also pre-exam time) in the end I really enjoyed challenging myself to do something new and unexpected!

 Thanks Suzanne for sharing your wonderful ideas and thank you to anyone who has dropped by to read this.