Time on the Wings of a Butterfly

Happy Creative Friday, Everyone!

Do you remember catching butterflies with Irina? Today we have a beautiful Grungy specimen caught on canvas by our Friend in Art - lovely talented Linda who is sharing her wonderful new creation & her love for Art Alchemy paints. :)

In the life of an Artist, there are good times, and not so good times… maybe even bad times.

When life is so busy, as it is here in the summer months, it seems there are never enough hours in the day. Sometimes the pressure to create within this time seems to leave us with projects that we don’t really “like.” And it feels like our time flies by on the wings of a butterfly, just barely out of our reach.

Then you have one of your Golden Moments where things just seem to click.

I was so happy to have one of these moments when this project came together. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

It's really hard to photograph a project with mica paints, but here I found laying it on a darker background helped. The white background just washed it all out, and you couldn't see the deep, rich colors of the metallic paints.

In order to see the shine, you have to have a light shining on your subject to bounce the mica color back to your eye. Every time you turn your project, it picks up a different color better than you saw in another direction. But believe me when I tell you, these paints are vibrant, and full of color.

1. I started with a 6x6 inch canvas board. I used 2 texture brushes to create some designs in Heavy White Gesso that I applied over the entire canvas.

When it was dry, I used embossing ink to stamp a script stamp in 2 spots and embossed with fine black embossing powder.

2. I made a few embellishments with the new Iron Orchid Design molds and paper clay. So using these as my main elements, I started to lay out my design.

3. When I had some basic idea, I started gluing with Heavy Body Gel and 3D Matte Gel, adding different found items and Mechanicals that I had cut apart.

When dry, give it all a coat of Heavy Black Gesso. I left the stamped area alone for some open space. I'm sorry I didn't remember to take a picture at this point, just use your imagination and envision this as a flat black blob in the middle of my canvas.

4. Here you can see where I used Soft Matte Gel to add Mini Art Stones as filler around the clock area, and then started to paint everything that is black.

5. I used every color of Opal Magics on this. All 8 colors.

6. The medium sized Grungy Butterfly is a rainbow of all the fabulous colors in this palette. The few colors of Metalliques that I used were for the heart with Rusty Red, Steampunk Copper, and some Gold Rush for highlights. Otherwise it was all done with the Opal Magics... which are just magical on black gesso!

7. I painted the German Dresden black and added Aqua-Rose, Green-Gold and Yellow-Blue Opal Magics. The fabulous purple on the lace comes from Violet-Green, and YES, it truly is that bright! I LOVE it.

8. You can see the detail on the mesh here with several colors painted in with a small brush.

9. The last thing I did was add some dry brushing with black gesso to the edges of the canvas and white areas, and give spots a spritz of Mica Powder spray.

Contrast and shine... it's so easy to achieve with these terrific paints.

Give them a go. You won't be sorry.

Your Friend in ART,
Linda

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