Turning a Page into a Work of Art

My last entry was from my art journal. It was the double-pager that I called "Be You-Nique". Little did I know that it was going to strike a chord with a scrapbooking friend in Arizona that I have never met in person, but we have become friends through Facebook. She liked the piece so much that she asked me to do it on a canvas and send it to her! Can I just say how incredibly humbling that was? I was shocked that something I am just learning to "play" with ended up being the first thing that anyone has ever asked me to put together for them to hang on a wall. In fact, it turns out that she wants to hang it in her classroom (she teaches 7th grade). What an honor! That is such an impressionable age and, really, what a great message to be sending out to them. In fact, I had actually been thinking about myself back in high school when I did the original. Funny, isn't it? So, I thought it might be nice to show how the piece kind of took form...

Here is the first "layer", so to speak. Using canvas is totally different from using my art journal and I was worried that the colors were not translating properly. I had to play around a bit to get to a spot where I was happy with the color mix, but once I got there it started to look how I wanted it to. You will note that I made some subtle changes: I used a diamond stencil instead of raindrops and instead of the brick stencil in the 2 bottom corners, I used a new cobblestone stencil I bought this past weekend. Even at such an early stage, I have to admit that I really like how it looks:

The next step is to start to lighten it up before I start adding the characters. Here I just added outlines with a white pen (but it mixes with the colors, so it is not a pure white color) and then added Stickles to some random diamonds (in person there is a great glitter factor from that):

Subtle, I know, but it really makes a difference when you see it in person. And now for the last touches: the characters...I kept with the bright pop of color on the girl and just stayed with the original idea I had when I did the other piece. I think that it is effective and didn't really need any changes:

I decided to use the same size for the silhouettes this time round. I used the smaller of the 3 sizes, so that the girl (Moth Fab) would stand out more prominently. I really like the finished product. The white pen allowed the colors underneath the black paint to bleed through. So, not as stark a contrast, but pretty cool, nonetheless. The final piece makes me smile and I am proud of getting it done for a friend. I even made sure to sign it ;)