Thank you for the music

Hello all, and a happy Sunday to you, wherever you are in the world.  So happy to have your company for a while here...

I'm listening to "Sunday music" as I type this, and sharing a canvas with you that, again, came out of playing while listening to music - as so many of my projects seem to have done recently.  So this piece also expresses some of my gratitude and joy for the great gift of music, and its inspiration.

I've been wanting to expand into canvases for some time - particularly inspired by the amazing Trish Latimer at Ink... Paint... Beads....  And I'm combining some of my favourite things again - my first love, stamping, especially with an inky, textured background and, in addition, the colour blue is quite a feature here.  

With the larger canvas I've been able to go a step further with the background, trying out some new techniques, and generally having a really good, messy muckabout!  I love the texture of the canvas showing through the ink and paint.  

It is, in fact, a canvas mountboard, 8 x 10, about £1 from The Range.  I thought it would be a good idea to find out if I enjoyed working on canvas with these cheaper versions before breaking into the piggy bank again for full canvases...  







Turns out I really love it!!  But I'm also perfectly happy to stick to the mountboard for now.  

I started by gluing down bits of book pages and music manuscript.  The print on these has mostly disappeared under the layers, but I still love that you see the edges, and that - thanks to the papers - there are places of smooth texture as well as the lovely rough canvas.

I then had a little play with some texture paste, and one of the lovely Tando masks I was lucky enough to win recently.  So cool, and so easy to get some really interesting texture onto the canvas.  And the mask is really good quality - it feels really strong as you use it. 

As well as scraping the paste through the mask, I also gave it a few cuts and strokes with an old credit card for added detail.  

In some places, I also just splodged some paste down, and then pressed onto it with an acrylic stamp block, lifting it straight up again to get these really cool textured patches.  

Of course, later it got extra definition from paint, ink and, in this case, some metallic Distress Stain in Pewter painted on with a brush.

I think it was at this point that I also grabbed some of the strings which are always lying around and stuck them on in little piles of random spaghetti.  They come off the cheap luggage tags I got.  

Sadly, I have now discovered that there really is a difference between them and the beautiful smooth Manila ones sold as craft tags - but I'm going to use up the ones I've got first!  Plus you get all these great strings to play with, of course...






I let all of that dry overnight, and in the morning I gave it a coat of gesso to knit it all together.  The next stage was some spritzing and spraying with Ranger Colorwash sprays as well as some Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist.  

I also added Distress Inks, using a blending tool, and some Perfect Pearls mica powder in Pearl for shading and highlights.  As mentioned above, I also used a paintbrush to add some Pewter Distress Stain direct from my craft mat - again to get some metallic highlights in places.

I then went in with the stamps - the text from Tim Holtz's Apothecary set, the music from the Pink Paislee London Market set, and some flourishes from Whimsy which I then embossed with Weathered White embossing powder.  

The flourishes are positioned so that they "grow out of" the random spaghetti - order out of chaos!

The focal image is stamped - in my usual way - onto tissue paper, and then glued into place.  



I love this ballerina from The Stampsmith, and I'm so delighted with the way you can still see the text stamping and the textures coming through the tissue.  



She's deliciously ethereal anyway as an image, and I hope I've enhanced that by having her hovering within the canvas in such a ghostly fashion!  

Finally, there's the sentiment - and I do realise some of you may have had an Abba song running through your heads for the duration, but that wasn't really my intention (although I love Abba, I was actually listening to Prokoviev!)... it was just a simple statement of gratitude. 











The letters are the black plastic Random Alpha Parts from Idea-ology, altered with some paint, alcohol inks and Perfect Pearls.  

Slightly strange fizzing chemical reaction at one point, but I splodged some paper towel on to calm it down!!






Thanks so much for your visit.  I'd love to know what you make of my first 'proper' canvas; every single one of your comments is deeply appreciated.  I'm off to do some Sunday browsing to see what you've all been up to...  See you soon!

A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm entering this in the following
Simon Says Stamp and Show... my Favourites are still stamping and inky backgrounds
The Stampsmith theme this month is With Gratitude, using a Stampsmith stamp
Unruly PaperArts are challenging us to Add Dimension to a Canvas