I Jumped Into Mixed Media............and I Like It!

You are probably familiar with the wonderful artist, Anna Dabrowska, known  as Finnabair.  She is from Poland I believe and has turned the art world upside down.  Her scrapbook pages and mixed media pieces are to die for.  She has her own line of supplies from Prima.  So she has inspired me and Angela Holt of Angela Holt Designs on You Tube showed me it could be done.  I watched Angela's  videos a lot of times.....a lot.  And today I jumped in with both feet.  Here's what I did.

Michaels had a wonderful sale on 12 x 12 canvases.  A dozen of them for less than $15.  Now I don't know about quality but to me they seemed fine.  I gessoed the whole thing and then painted the background with black acrylic paint.  Then using Claudine Hellmuth's Multi Medium Matte I collaged on a bunch of random papers.  On top of that I used two stencils with texture paste and laid on some scrim or cheese cloth using the Multi medium.  Then I used about five sprays to color the background over all that.  I had found an image to use, enlarged it, printed it, cut it out and ran it through my Xyron then adhered it to cardstock.  I cut it out and hot glued it to the canvas.  Then with the glue gun I began to lay down chipboard, laces, metal pieces, flowers of all kind (color doesn't matter because you will cover them up), crystals, buttons, some Tim Holtz pieces, pearls, and jewelry findings I found on sale in Michaels.  I collect this kind of stuff all the time so I had a good amount in my stash to work with.

When your piece is all ready then, you use an old brush and cover the whole thing with white gesso, getting in all the nooks and crannies.  When dry you spray, using the same colors you used on the background.  So many color possibilities are possible!  One of the sprays I used was a gold metallic to kind of unify everything.

Note:  the lady in the picture is Billy Burke who was the wife of Florence Ziegfeld but you might know her better as the Good Witch of the North from Wizard of Oz!  Enjoy!