….under the sea.

One of my favourite projects from the April Paperie Retreat – actually, one of my favourite projects ever – was a canvas I did just as we were gearing down to go home. I had the base done, had demoed on it for previous canvas classes, and it needed to be finished.

I painted the base texture with Silks and Primary Elements with no idea of where I was heading. Once the colour was on all I could see was the ocean.

So I stole a bit of moss from Tina, an old compass transparency from Cathie, stuck on a bit of cheesecloth (a personal texture making fave!) and played around with Dyan Reaveley’s Ruby Rainbow set to make myself a mermaid in the sea.

Ruby has crazy hair in the stamp set so I cut it off, moved it all around, then painted it, and some cheesecloth, with Orange Peel Twinks. And made her hair even a bit more crazy than before!

Her tail is a shimmery bit of awesomeness made possible by Primary Elements mixed into Old Silver Inka Gold. I then etched the scales with a pencil. It’s hard to photograph but the colour starts pink and fades into purple – it’s just gorgeous:

I printed the words on some Martha Stewart Avery labels (love those kraft self-adhesive labels for quotes like this!) and stuck them down:

I wish you could all see this in person because the shimmer and dimension and texture and subtle colour variation is fab! Yes, I’m patting my own back! 🙂

I hope you like her as much as I do, she sits on the wall over my computer where I can enjoy her everyday:

I’m offline for a few days now; I have a very special wedding to attend this weekend (the card and hopefully some pics to come next week) and then fingers are crossed for a day at the cabin on the Sands. I also have ICAD’s to catch up on, some special guest blog posts to write, and an exciting scrapbook project to dive into. I’ll be back when I can come up for air!

S.