Sunday Stampers - Week 55 - Silver Lady

Morning Stampers!

First of all, thank you for joining in last week, it was lovely to see a few new faces too whom I hope will return for future challenges...it is great to see lots of different takes on the one theme.

This week the theme is a very simple one - the original theme has had to go by the wayside for another week 'cos I couldn't get my piece finished in time....but I have managed to get this canvas finished, finally, it has taken me all week!

Ah, the theme, yes, all you need to do is include something SILVER in your artwork, use stamping and then leave a comment with a link on this post and I can come and visit you :O)) *BTW, does anyone remember this lovely song by David Soul? Oh, he was my first crush when I was 6 years old!*





For my canvas, I started by prepping a deep edged 8" x 6" by painting it with a couple of coats of Gesso. The canvas was pre-primed but I like to have that extra depth on the surface. I then took some Violet acrylic paint and mixed in some white paint. I made an Indigo colour and then painted this all over the surface of the canvas.





Once this was dried, I painted a coat of PVA glue all over the surface and then immediately painted a coat of paint that I had pre-mixed using the Violet and the white but this time leaving the colour darker. It is important to put the paint straight onto the wet PVA, try not to overbrush the PVA and paint together and you will get a lovely scratchy crackle effect as the PVA dries, it separates and takes the top coat of paint with it, leaving the lower layer showing thru.





Next, I painted some Claudine Helmuth sticky canvas - this is one of my "must have" crafty supplies as it is so versatile. I used the original Indigo colour I had mixed to paint an A4 size piece of canvas - then cut it in half when dried and using a stipple brush, picked up the darker colour and streaked this over one half - this meant that I had two different colours for my flowers.




The flowers are from my new range of unmounted stamps which are available from The Artistic Stamper. If you click here you can go straight to the page where they are. I stamped several of the large and smaller flowers using a clear embossing ink and then heat embossed with silver powder. I next painted a smaller piece of sticky canvas with Silver Adirondack Acrylic paint and once this had dried, I stamped the leaves, large and small, using black StaZon. While I had the silver paint out, I covered all four sides of the deep edged canvas to give a little bit of definition to the whole project.




Next, I peeled the backing off the Sticky Canvas and stuck this to some metal foil sheets. This meant that once I had cut out all of the images, I could curl them and make them stay in shape as the metal gives the canvas a bit more stability.

Now for the fiddly bit - I faffed about with wire and beads and pearls to make some centres for the flowers and some extra accents to add under the flowers - I used thick wire for the centres, curling it and then sticky a pearl to the end. The pearls came from an old necklace I got from a junk shop.




The main element of the canvas is the stampbord ATC. This was painted and shaded and then stamped with one of the wordy stamps made in my handwriting (how cool!) that are also available from The Artistic Stamper. I embossed this with silver and then used the vine stamp to add detail on the edges of the stampbord and also I stamped around the silver edges of the canvas.




Finally.....hurrah! I had picked up a cheapy bracelet in Claires Accessories the other day, not to wear but because it had some fabby little metal tassles on it - it was on a £1 and I also got the metal flowers from it too. These were added to the canvas once the flowers were all placed with silicone glue.

Right, enough waffle from me, you are all champing at the bit to get off to those Easter Eggs I know.....and I wish you all a very Happy Easter too.

Thanks for looking and hope that you will be able to join in again this week!

Hels x

PS - I have just noticed that my Blog Counter is nearly at 40,000 so as a thank you for being such lovely visitors, if you join in with the challenge this week, please leave a comment as usual and then you will be entered into the draw, one person will be chosen at random to win some Blog Candy which will include some mini Stitchels stamps and some KlingOn to mount them on. Thanks!!!!