Change in the Making Canvas Tutorial

Today's canvas was inspired by my favorite Mercy River CD, Higher. Not only are their songs beautiful and uplifting but I find that inspiration always accompanies listening to them. I was dutifully doing the dishes a couple days ago when lighting struck! Change in the making would be the perfect tagline for a canvas since each and everyone of us is a change in the making every single day, right?

I shut the water off, ran for my canvas stack and gathered all my supplies before my inspiration could fizzle out. I decided to use one of my new techniques inspired yet again by the lovely Shawn Pettie.

Thanks to Shawn I found that gel medium is fantastic (much better than Mod Podge or even decoupage) when it comes to creating with paper and canvas. I've never had great success with either of those two and had shied away from using paper on my canvases...a real shame considering I have a stockpile I'm dying to use up.

Start with a clean canvas and spread a layer of gel medium over it. Now take your paper (cardstock, newspaper, book pages, whatever you want) and layer them on the gel. Make sure you cover each piece with more gel medium as you go insuring that each piece is properly adhered to your canvas.

Once your canvas is covered let it dry a couple of hours. From here I used a floral stamp to create some dimension against the background. I loved that the stamp didn't leave full impressions thanks to the canvas' frame underneath. After you get all your stamping the way you want, grab some watered down acrylic and paint some accents around the canvas...helps create more layers and the water makes it more translucent. I filled in a few of my flowers and leaves using different colors.

Since I love dimension I added some hand-cut mini butterflies before painting my tagline with acrylic. See, so easy and so much fun letting inspiration guide the way. It's amazing where it can start when we're actually paying attention and willing to follow.

Happy Crafting,

Misty

If you loved this free tutorial look into booking one of my creative workshops.