Butterfly Canvas by Elisa Ablett

Hi everyone!!

Happy Sunday again, grab a cuppa and sit down with me as I share my canvas tutorial.

Just sharing the Butterfly Canvas I created using the awesome Colour Blast Pastes and Shimmer Sprays which can be found here - http://www.colourblastaust.com.au/

The colours that I used include the following - Pastes : Just Blue, Lipstick, Bling and Sprays: Lipstick, Just Blue, Bling, Envy, Deep Water and Royalty.

Let's get started!! Firstly I used a 12 x 12 canvas primed with gesso and lightly sketched a large butterfly, I then rifled through my stencil stash as you can see below and grabbed out a handful of my favourite stencils and of course ...selected the Colour Blast Pastes and sprays that I wanted to use.

Next Step! using Bling Paste and a spatula or palette knife spread your Paste through your stencil on even sides of the butterfly.

Then once dry thoroughly, select another larger stencil and add different colour Pastes using a palette knife, I used Lipstick and Just Blue !

Once your Paste is dry on both sides of the butterfly, take the tops off your co-ordinating sprays and using a paintbrush fill in your butterfly shape using the liquid from the spray bottles as per the photo's above and below.

After I coloured in the butterfly with the co-ordinating sprays to the Pastes I gathered together a few more shimmer sprays to add some more COLOUR!! because by now you should know that I love colour :-) I used Envy, Deep Water, Royalty and Snow White sprays to add more colour to my Butterfly using a paintbrush. I was looking for a watercolour tye-dyed or batik effect.

The finishing touches! as from the photo above you can see I added splashes of bling Shimmer Spray in splats and splotches (totally a technique don't knock it til you try it!) also I added a few dots of an metallic acrylic ink by Daler Rowney which has a thick consistancy, you could probably use a white acrylic paint instead in this part. I dotted the ink on the edges of the butterfly wings and used the bottom of my paint brush to drag the colour out into stripes. Also as you can see from the photo below, part of my finishing touches include using an embossing dauber from Ranger which i dobbed a few dots in the middle of my butterfly and embossed them with Envy, Lipstick, Just Blue, Bling and Royalty Embossing Powders. Also to add some texture and added interest I decided to use rough hessian twine and twirl it into circles as the butterfly body and also on the wings. 

From the photo below you can see some close ups of the twine circles. I used a high tack glue by Helmar to stick them onto the Canvas.

After the canvas had dried completely, I couldn't help myself so I added some MORE! I used a white paint marker pen by Sharpie and traced around the circles and the twine circles, and then used a black thin marker pen to trace unevenly around the Butterfly. And then added some splashes of Envy spray and Bling Spray around the Butterfly to create a  slight shading effect.

Just showing a great close up of the shimmer and shine of the Pastes and Sprays, sometimes its hard to get the right lighting when taking the photos so that we can show you the amazing shimmer and shine from the products so I like to get a few 'along the way' close up's to show what the Canvas is really like in the right light.

Well that's it for me today, I hope you have enjoyed the tutorial and my Canvas but better yet I have shown you another great way to create using Colour Blast Products.

Thanks Elisa xx