It’s been a while since I last blogged but I certainly haven’t been idol. I’ve been trying out lots of new things and trying to work in some techniques that I already enjoy.

I am therefore very pleased to be able to bring you another Monday Mash Up this week. This time it is a bit of home decor that starts out with a small artist’s canvas and some cheap wrapping paper.

The creation process was quite organic. I only really had the canvas and wrapping paper as a starting point – as I started, I didn’t have a clue what this was going to look like when it was complete.

To start this canvas I applied a thin layer of Mod Podge (for paper) to adhere a sheet of pretty wrapping paper to a blank canvas.

I did use a foam roller to press the paper down and also used a heat gun to speed up the drying process.

The paper did wrinkle as a result a little however, rather than having a creative paddy, I thought that I would try and use this to my advantage and make this a distressed canvas.

I then cut/tore away most of the overlapping sheet.

Then, using a sanding block, I roughed away the remaining overlapping sheet and also roughed up the edges a little, to start enhancing that distressed look.

To bring this into the fore, I also roughed the sanding block over the main area of the design (where the wrinkles were) and also roughed away more of the edges.

With the distressed look I have noticed that there are often “dirty” edges or corners.

To “dirty” up the corners on this canvas I used three shades of Versacraft Ink Cubes – light = Peony Purple, midtone = Wisteria and the dark shade = Real Black.

I chose these colours specifically as they worked well with the colours already present on the wrapping paper.

I applied the lightest shade first, dragging the ink cube over the edges and into the main area.

I repeated this technique with the mid shade ink cube but brought less of it over the edge.

The first application didn’t quite give the intensity of colour that I wanted so I did go back and “fiddle” a little by applying a couple more layers of colour. I dried each layer with the heat gun because this was a glossy paper and the ink was taking quite a bit of time to dry.

The benefit of Versacraft ink is that it can be heatset.

I then sponged some Ivory Black Galeria Acrylic paint onto the edges of the canvas.

With the background complete I turned my mind onto what I was going to put in the centre of the canvas.

Looking at the backing paper I remembered a stencil that I had made from Doeflex Template Plastic with my Brother Scan N Cut so went and hunted that out – my craft room REALLY needs more organisation, lol!

After locating the stencil I placed it in the middle of the canvas and, using the same three colours of Versacraft Ink Cubes as for the edges, I began daubing on successively lighter shades of colour, working out from the centre – first the black …

… then the Wisteria …

… and finally the Peony Purple.

Looks good so far.

Cup of tea in hand I then began musing what to add in terms of embellishments.

Again, looking at the background I noticed butterflies in the design – I therefore decided that that was going to be the focal feature however I needed to satisfy my need for bling first so I used some Anita’s gems to punctuate each junction of the stenciled design.

For the butterfly focal feature I had a dig through my stamp collection and found a beautiful butterfly design from Indigo Blu.

I stamped the design (in black Versacraft) and heat embossed (with clear embossing powder) onto white cardstock and then smeared over some of the Versacraft inks.

I liked the butterfly but wanted to add a little sparkle to it so I used Perfect Medium to adhere some Inkadinkado clear sparkle embossing powder and then heat set it.

This looked nice so I cut the design out using a pair of scissors. It then occured to me that the embossing needed more “depth” so I used Perfect Medium and added another layer of clear embossing powder to encapsulate the glitter layer.

I had made a mistake on a previous attempt at the butterfly but it still looked ok-ish so I decided to use this as a base layer for the butterfly and stuck that to the canvas with Pinflair Glue Gel, raising the wings a little.

And then added the finished butterfly (that I was happy with) over the top of the first one, again lifting the wings with some Glue Gel.

So this was where I got to with that canvas.

Although I liked it, I wanted to add a little more to the design to finish it off so I broke out the wire and bead box and combined a few random bits and bobs to create the thorax and antenna of the butterfly.

I also added some purple beads to glass head pins and stuck them into the canvas.

There you have it, a lovely design I think. Don’t you?

I was quite proud of this design – I like the simple colour combo that works through all aspects of the design and also those finishing touches really bring it to life, don’t you think?

Well, that’s it for this one. There are more on the way so do pop back when you have the chance.

As ever, if you have any questions or comments about this post, please feel free to pop them in the comments section below and I will do my best to answer any questions.

Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next time.

J :)