Changing Seasons Canvas

I was honoured to be asked to be contributing artist for the month of August in the new Artistic Stamper Creative Team Blog.  This is the first of my pieces inspired by two of my favourite colours plum and lime. This canvas is mounted on a board back but you could use any canvas or the Claudine Helmuth sticky backed canvas and make your own. I will always provide an ingredient list with links to the Artistic Stamper online store where you can get the goodies needed to make the canvas or one of your own.

Ingredients:

1. Canvas (7 x 9.5 ins)

2. Adirondack Dye inks (Wild Plum and Lettuce)

4. Adirondack Dimensional Pearls Paint (Wild Plum and Lettuce)

5. Martha Stuart punch

6. Glossy Accents

7. Metal plate embellishment

8. White Card

9. Clear UTEE

10. Versamark inkpad

Stamps:

1. Florals plate

2. Dots Background

I started by preparing the canvas which had already had a coat of white gesso.  Don't know whether you know that the Adirondack Dimensional Pearls can be thinned with water and used as a pearlescent paint.  I squirted an almond sized blob of wild plum into a saucer and added a little water so the paint was quite thin and applied a liberal coat with a 1.5 ins wide brush, allowing to puddle in places.  Whilst still wet I did the same with the lettuce and then dried with the heat gun.  The finish is subtle and also has retained a super pearlescent sheen.

I then took the dots background stamp and again applied neat dimensional pearls to the stamp with the brush and stamped randomly in both the wild plum and lettuce, drying once again with the heat gun.  Remember to wash the brush and the stamp thoroughly between colours and after use as the dried paint can be a devil to remove from the stamp !  That was the background completed.

Next I took the florals stamps and stamped two of the large plain edged flower, four of the medium line- edged flower & four of the small line-edged flower with Adirondack wild plum ink onto white card.  I then used a waterbrush and drew in the wild plum dye ink from the outside of the flowers into the petals and once dry cut them out.  I then used the Adirondack lettuce ink as paint and applied some to the inside of the lid of the inkpad and used the waterbrush to complete the insides of each flower. 

Next five of the closed leaf and five of the open leaf were stamped onto white card with lettuce Adirondack dye ink, the large leaves being further stamped with a hessian texture stamp.  These were then trimmed out.

All the finished flower elements and leaves were then coated with Versamark and heat embossed with one coat of clear UTEE to add a nice shine to them.  The flower layers were then assembled with Glossy Accents.

The top and bottom borders were cut with a Martha Stewart punch from card that I had painted unevenly with a narrow brush with a wash made from the wild plum and lettuce inkpads by rubbing them onto a craft sheet and spritzing with water.  The background was built up until it looked good before drying and punching.

The borders were trimmed to size and applied top and bottom with Glossy Accents. The flowers and leaves were arranged on the canvas and finally stuck in place with more Glossy Accents. The centres of the flowers were finished with some blobs of the undiluted Dimensional Pearls and the changing seasons metal plate was applied as shown.

I only literally used 2 colours on the whole canvas but in a number of different types of media. Hope this has inspired you to make one in your own style, the stamps are really good to build up flowers and on this one I particularly liked the watercoloured effect on the petals.

Sid xx