Fifty Shades of Candyfloss

      Hello everyone! Welcome back - I am so glad you have come along to have a peek at what I made.

        Ok..the title is a bit misleading - I haven't got Fifty shades of Candyfloss in this artwork...I originally called this blog post 'Shades of Candyfloss' and my DH laughed and said "Are there fifty of them?" So I couldn't resist! Certainly a more fun sounding title than Fifty shades of Grey...maybe the book should have featured candyfloss....Nope, don't want that image in my head and I apologise if it is now in your head too!

 This technique is a new thing for me - I seem to be wanting to spread my wings a little now and try new techniques. I found this one on Sandra's blog....I don't usually watch many video demos but I was really intrigued by the work so I sat and watched. Here is the link if you want to watch it for yourself.

    .Mine was always going to be different - firstly because we all create our own unique work, but also because - yes you guessed it! - I didn't have any of the materials! Luckily I did have the basic canvas, embellishments and glue - but I don't own the opaque Gesso, black acrylic paint and the vivid ink sprays...

    The technique - very simply stated is -

     Cover your canvas, book, object with any decorations you want
     Paint all over with Gesso
     Spritz with various ink colours
     Dry brush with Gesso
     Dry brush with black acrylic paint
     Dry brush with Gesso again

   In the video demo I watched there was another application of embellishments and I think further application of ink....but the above instructions are what I did.

    I do have Gesso but it is one that isn't very opaque...so I had to do two coats of Gesso and it still didn't cover everything very well.

I don't have vivid ink spray colours so I used my homemade distress ink sprays. These aren't as bright and intense as other ink sprays, but they do have quite a good depth of colour. So I thought, I will go for a more pastel look anyway.

    Because dry brushing the Gesso I have wouldn't have made any difference, and you want the white to be quite vivid to give highlights, I used white tempura paint. This is more opaque and allowed me to add more colour if I wanted to.

After the inks have been sprayed, I dry brushed the tempura paint over the embellishments.

I didn't want to use black acrylic paint...in the demo the ink colours used are quite dark, so I think it could handle black paint. My ink sprays were very pale, so I chose to dry brush some french Roast Fresco paint. This is quite a dark paint but it is translucent.

At this point I was thinking it isn't going to work and everything looked quite muddy....but hey presto! the last layer of white picked everything up again and made everything pop!

    I don't think it is my favourite thing I have ever made - but it was a lot of fun to do and certainly gave me more experience in decorating canvases. I really like the technique and I think it gives so many possibilities - I find it difficult to do the grungier crafts and perhaps I didn't quite master it yet - The results weren't hugely appealing to me, but like everything skill comes with practice. I thought about not putting it on the blog and this has been in 'drafts' for a few days while I tried to decide if it was 'blogworthy' or not. With some of my previous creations my least favourite pieces have been the most popular, so who am I to judge?....I really am not the best judge of my work and I do like using the blog as a diary of my progress in learning crafts so I decided it should be here....

    One lovely thing to happen with this canvas is that my daughter asked if she could have it and she plans to hang it up in her room! She loved it! - So I am very happy about that. There are things I would do differently next time....Larger canvas, better embellishments - I would definitely want to have some stronger colours - I think perhaps it is finally time for me to venture into new areas of crafts and buy some ink sprays!

So glad you are here....Thanks for stopping by!

I would like to enter this into the following challenges -

Happy Campers Challenge - Add Dimension