Let The Sun Shine by Emma

Hi everyone, and welcome to my second post in June.

Well, here in the UK, summer seems to be very stubborn at the moment and not really want to show it's sunny side, so I thought I'd bring some sunshine into our lives with this canvas. As always, I hope you like it...

To begin with, I applied some PaperArtsy Grunge Paste, onto my 7" x 5" canvas, through the Wendy Vecchi Brick Wall stencil from my stash. This paste dries so quickly, it's perfect for impatient people like me but just to be sure, I gave it a blast with the heat gun. I then covered the entire canvas with Wild Honey, Barn Door and Vintage Photo Distress Paints. Blending them together with a spritz of water and then a blast of heat to dry them. I then added a touch of gilding wax from my stash to highlight the brick work, which you can see just poking through from under the flowers, in these pics.

Once, I was happy with the colour, I then started stamping onto the canvas, firstly with black Archival Ink, using the Sequin Waste Open Size A5 Stamp, then I used white acrylic paint to stamp the Dots Background and the circles from the Swirls, Splats and Dots A5 stamp.

I stamped the bee from the Insects and Butterflies plate and also the quote from Katy Fox's Encyclopaedia Botanica plate onto tissue paper and then applied these to the canvas with Claudine Hellmuth's Multi Matte Medium.

To complete the background of my canvas, I used Black Soot Distress Paint around the edges.

Now for the huge flowers, and I created these using Tim Holtz's Tattered Florals die and coloured them with Dylusions Pure Sunshine and Squeezed Orange Ink Sprays. I then used Walnut Stain Distress Ink on the edges of the flowers.

I added my flowers to the canvas, together with some die cut leaves and some seam binding that I dyed using Antique Linen Distress Stain.

I added some wire coils through the centres of buttons and popped those into the middles of my flowers and a few more coils sticking out from the flowers.

Finally, I added some metal embellishments from my stash to complete the canvas.

So, that's it from me for today and I hope I did manage to bring just a little bit of sunshine into your day with my bright canvas.

I'll see you all again very soon but until then, thank you so much for visiting today and I can't wait to read all your comments. Don't forget you still have some time to enter our monthly challenge, Makes for Men and we'd love to see your creations.

Hope you all have a wonderful crafty week ahead...

Emma x