Forever In My Heart

As usual, I've procrastinated to the last minute.  Seriously... I think I do my best work when I procrastinate.  That gets my juices flowing and I get inspired.  Or maybe it just motivates me to get off my butt and actually do it!  

So I've been wanting to do another canvas for awhile now.  I purchased more Lindy's Stamp Gang sprays a few months back and filled them up, but never used them.  I had bought some before, but found them to be too dark, so I bought the lighter shades, which is more my style.  I'm still learning, but I like how the colors ended up blending together.

Made this canvas for my Mother In Law for Mother's Day.  I had made a canvas for my mom earlier but never made one for my MIL. I hope she likes it.  Not sure this is really her style, but oh well.

Before I did anything, I painted a coat of Gesso on the canvas. I don't know if I need to do that, but I did anyway.  After that dried, I used my favorite Prima stencil and modeling paste at the top. It was a bit challenging because I'm not patient and wanted to start the next section, but had to wait till the first section dried.  It's not hard, just took awhile to dry.

After the pasting was done, I started working on the design.  I tried to pick out white or ivory colored flowers as much as possible so I could spray them up with my Lindy's. I saw a few videos where they gesso'd up everything before spraying, so I did that too.

Because Akemi's dress was turquoise, I had to incorporate it somehow into the project.  I have a LOT of turquoise, teal colors, but didn't want to go  too dark, so I opted for the lightest one and sprayed it closest to her so that it would blend well.  Then I worked my way out with green on both sides of the blue, etc.

After spraying up the layout, we went to go eat dinner.  By the time we came back, it was dry, but I didn't think it had enough color, so I did another layer.  This came out much nicer to my taste.

After that layer dried, I filled in the holes with my acrylic flowers.  I only used the clear ones so it woudn't compete with the rest of the layout.

The most challenging part for me was to fill in the "white space" with the sentiment or title.  I had something picked out from another stencil, but the words were too thin, I didn't want to risk it, so instead, I rummaged through my dies and found this PTI set that had dies that coordinated with the stamp set.  I thought "Forever in my heart" was a cute sentiment to add to the layout.

Then I got some floral wire and formed a heart. I was inspired after watching Bona's video when she did something similar using the Prima wire.  I had done something similar before  but didn't add the flowers and stickles this time- just kept it simple.

Hope you had a great Mother's Day!  I think I gotta play with my sprays more often!