Perhaps not a very imaginative art journal post, but a pretty one! Bluebirds, yellow roses, bumble bees, and a mottled turquoise background all get together to celebrate the beauty of late spring.
This is what I did with the drawing I shared with you last week, and I hope you, too, found something fun to do with it.
The start was simple enough‒a background painted with a few different blue greens randomly placed. Then stenciling with white. These stencils, by the way, are ones I made. I was in a stencil-making period a few years ago, working with my Cricut machine. It would cut stencil material, and all I had to do was make a black and white image, scan it into the computer, then process it with the Cricut program. It was a fun thing to do‒though a bit tedious! I’ve used those stencils several times over the years. I often think I’d like to make some more. The thing that’s stopping me is simply figuring out the process again! By now, there's probably a new version of the software.
Oh, and I should have said that I did the senciling on a piece of “tea bag paper” that I bought on Amazon (I think). That paper is thin but not fragile. When I glued it over the painted background, you can see the edges of the tea bag paper which adds more interest than just stenciling directly over the painted background.
I thought about transferring the bird and rose design onto pieces of good paper then gluing them down. But, in the end, I decided to just use a printer copy of my drawing. Before I glued it down, I had to fix it with a good spray of Krylon Workable Fixatif so the printer ink wouldn’t run.
Then I saw that the lines from the copy were darker than I wanted, so I painted over the copy paper with a few coats of white gesso. That was to tone those lines down. In the photo below, I’ve added gesso to the right side but not the left.
After that, it was just a matter of painting. I tried to be pretty meticulous, and I have to admit that those roses were a real challenge for me. But, finally, I was satisfied. Then it was on to the bees.
It just didn’t feel finished though. So I turned to my trusty alcohol inks to add the larger blobs and spattered the background with both white and cobalt blue thinned acrylic.
Still, it needed more. So I cut tiny crowns of gold foil for the birds and the bees. Then, just following the “more is more” rule (yes, I know it’s officially ‘less is more,’ but to each her own) I added rhinestones to the crowns. The bird crowns have pretty little rhinestone clusters, but the bee crowns only had room for single rhinestones.
Here’s a closer look at the left side. Cropped this way, I think they’d make beautiful greeting cards, or maybe even nice little framed pieces.
PS You may be wondering why the pink heart is there. It just seemed like a little color accent would be nice and there, on my worktable, was the foil wrapper from a raspberry/chocolate Lindt truffle. On a whim, I cut a small heart and when I laid it on the piece I really liked that little bit of a different color. So, the foil heart found a home.
PPS No matter what kind of paper I'm painting on, I like to seal it first with two coats of Liquitex Matte Medium. It makes a wonderful surface to paint on with acrylics.
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So beautifully executed. I really love this one.