Moments In a World

Here is my entry for the month of July for the challenge in ...

Scrap Around The World 

http://scraparoundtheworld.blogspot.tw/2015/07/july-2015-challenge-27-by-pamela-ellis.html

This is the mood board  that is just full of color, life and invites the mind to travel and create.  

The first inspiration when looking at the steps and reading the quote  was to scrap one of my hubby's pictures from Nepal but they were just too difficult to get ahold of before he left to go back there, so I am entering this canvas which was my second option as it does not seem to match the other art styles for this month but if it is accepted  perhaps it will inspire new ideas.

Here are some shots taken with my vintage OLYMPUS camera.

The original idea to create this 30x 41 canvas came while looking at a water color painting I did a couple of years ago of red poppies, a thought came of how interesting it would be if they popped out of the paper like they were coming to life, the excess drops also made a blur of a tiny fairy holding onto the stem sooo ....  this is how it turned out, The poppy theme turned into some other magical flower , but the idea is different and fun if anyone else wants to give it a go.

The idea was to create an outcroppings of poppy stems in the background sort of bending and swaying. The lower half was to be a wild undergrowth of plants and flowers.  My guess was that this could be achieved  with gauze and white paste. So the first layer was glueing the gauze down but pulling and pinching it along diagonally down the canvas. Next was bunching and gluing more gauze as the undergrowth, and sprinkling coarse sand here and there, when I ran out of gauze I used my  paper mache technique to fill in the gaps. Took about 36 hours to totally dry. 

Next was covering it all in gesso (if I were to do something different it would be loosening up the gauze a bit somehow before gluing it down so it would not be so rigid and I would have added another layer of gesso over the gauze.) I then painted the background layer over layer with watered down acrylic paints and after the background was dry worked on the foreground. 

The long stems are paper wrapped wire, brushed with glue and coarse sand added for texture and painted over with gesso a couple of times then painted. I also made a lot of small plant stems with leaves for layering over the tall stems along with the small wild flowers. 

I tried 3 different  techniques for the larger 3D petals, my first idea was to make them the same way I created the mermaid tail here..

http://anneelisabeths.blogspot.tw/2015/04/currents-of-sea.html

..but that took a few days so I tried glass petals, but it did not seem to blend well, then I tried paper petals but it also did not seem the right choice, so moved back to my original idea  of using cheap, thin, ripped tissue painted over with a mixture of gesso and talcum powder. This takes LONG as we all know what happen with tissue as soon as any liquid touches it, so it is a delicate process of layer upon layer until it keeps its full form on it's own This takes a couple of days so it is good to have other projects going along beside you or in my case I was working on the little fae boy. I usually find a place to hang the petals then layer them gently every hour or so as it dries. Finally paint them and glue them on the canvas, then paint over again, shade and highlight as needed. The centers are paper mache and the darker inner petals are strips of gauze inked black, dipped in black glitter and highlighted with gold paint.

So that is the basis of the journey with this canvas. 

These small flowers are from I am Roses with some added shimmers and glitter

Thanks for looking and have a great day.