France
- Dec 20, 2018

Butterfly Squad creative team inspiration: Melina

Hello lovely Butterflies,

I can not stop bragging about the beautiful artwork my team made for my Hochanda tv shows. And if you think you saw it all up close by now, guess again! Today Butterfly Squad member Melina is having a look back at one of her pieces that was simply scrumptious! Or when layering becomes an art. And she's sharing how she did it with you all today:

Hello everyone!

Hope you are all fine and not too stressed about all the things that should be done before Christmas.

Here´s what I did:

I use one of the stamps from France´s Illusionary Artists stamp set 1800. I stamp repeatedly on the right side onto watercolour paper and heat emboss with white embossing powder. This will act as a resist to the coming layers.

I dilute some Fluid acrylics in Raw Umber, Paynes Grey and Primary Magenta and play with them, letting them spread and blend on the paper, until happy.

I colourise some modeling paste with Paynes gray and apply throught France´s large Honeycomb stencil. I also continue to add layers with diluted Raw umber and Paynes grey.

I stamp the beautiful horses from the 1800 stamp set with waterbased ink onto white card and cut them out. It´s important to use a waterbased ink if you want to use alcohol markers to colour them in. I know, I´m not that good with the markers yet, but I´ll keep practicing ;)

I go bananas with the rest of the stamps from the stamp set, now concentrating on the left side of the page.

To finish off the piece I make a little cluster of old book paper, colourised cambric, a Butterfly Whispers mixed media sticker and a phrase sticker. I place them as a ground for the horses to stand on. I also go around the edges, first with Distress ink Walnut stain and then Black soot, before gluing it down on slightly bigger black cardstock. As a final touch I add some more diluted Primary magenta here and there to bring it back from the background and to match the magenta in the sticker.