Mixed Media Canvas with Ever Changing

Just bought and received a Unity Kit in the last sale called Ever Changing (Through Time). It had been calling me for a long time. In cleaning this week, I also found another small canvas just waiting to be used. So, putting 2 and 2 together (along with about 100 other pieces ;-) ), I decided I had to try out some ideas I had to create a 3D mixed media piece (layered pieces). I started looking through various pieces of wood chip boards, metal pieces and other ephemera, I had bought on sale, hoping to try out a few on a canvas in this style. Given the theme and looks of the stamps, I decided to focus on the word “changing” and the circular image, numbers and lines in the main stamp for selecting pieces and stencils. For colors, I settled on teals, blue, gold and red.

To summarize some of the items I collected to use are: @ signs, gears, a dress form (get it, changing?), butterflies (metal, wood and paper), Seth Apter circle dies (one with numbers), an arrow, clocks (metal brad and wood), tiny hearts, circular brad, flowers, and circular letter pieces. I used a window shutter 7Gypsies Architexture piece as a stencil with the dark teal paint, as well as an Art Anthology stencil to create white numbers and dots. I also used a TCW stencil for the gold lines. I used a small teal clothespin for the wooden butterfly’s antennae.

Besides the Unity Kit above I also used a treadmark background stamp from the 8/18 SMAK kit to add a little red and the butterfly from the 12/12 KOTM Kit to stamp the painted wooden butterfly.

I used a variety of sprays, pastes and paints (Art Anthology, Ranger, Brea Reese, ...) and pens. I also used white gesso to highlight and tone down colors when needed. I used a tacky glue and hot glue gun. For paper for the dies, I gessoed the cover sheet of my Canson paper pad.

As usual, I learned a lot from this exercise... mostly, you need to take time for things to dry (sometimes overnight). I am relatively happy with how it turned out given it’s the first 3D kind. But I definitely need to focus more on creating a focal point and emphasizing it with contrasts (lights & darks, contrasting colors, brighter colors) than the rest. The coarse canvas also needs better paint coverage, I think. In closeups, I see white peaking through. Need to get better at applying paints to 3D objects as well. So, to sum up, I’m not discouraged with this effort. I stamped directly onto the canvas... another option may be to stamp onto tissue paper and decoupage that.

Well, that’s all for now. Back to Cards! Hope you enjoyed reading about what I did! Feel free to critique and offer advice. I’m definitely in a learning mode here!