Shanghai Butterfly

So inspired by this piece by Suzanne Czosek on the PaperArtsy blog this week, I came up with this.

The canvas had a layer of Limelight as the base and then I mixed some Limelight and Mermaid to get a more minty bluey green and washed that over the top.  

Then I stencilled some large dots with the minty green with a touch of Tinned Peas mixed in (I love working in this tonal way just varying the shades and density of the paint). Finally I stencilled through a damask type mask with Tinned Peas.


I then started to give the canvas some washes in Limelight and Beach Hut just to flatten out and almost hide the stencilling.  The only oriental themed stamps I have are plate Vintage ID05EZ, so I stamped the long word and little receipt in Olive Archival over the canvas. Then I used Versamark through a small ditty mask and covered in Sticky Embossing Powder and stuck down some gold foil. 

The centre is a piece of mount board covered in thin layer of Grunge Paste in the centre.  I was working on this at the same time as the canvas so I just used the various washed I was using on the canvas on this, just made the final layers a bit darker to contrast against the canvas. Some Treasure Gold in Acquamarine, Green Amber and Spanish Topaz over this (gave it a good buff to make it shine). I stamped and embossed the text stamp in Olive Archival again and added smidges of jade embossing power plus some bits of foil. It was edged in Frantage black enamel embossing powder (as was the canvas, just to tie it all in together and frame it.

The butterfly was cut from a scrap piece of gold metal and run through an embossing folder.  Limelight added and then added some Frantage Aged Spice Embossing Enamel. Edged it with a little bit of Little Black Dress just to define the edges.

Phew, all this was done this morning in between painting my bathroom (I'm thinking of doing some Jocasta Innes inspired stamping to create a bit of fresco look in our roman inspired bathroom.  The great woman died this month and I was listening to her daughter talk about her on Radio 4 on Friday, her paint effects inspired a nation during the 80s and 90s with rag rolling and stencilling).

And I think I've just scraped in under the radar for the challenge!

Hugs
 jo
xx