Joyful Kreations: Musical Notes – Mixed Media Canvas

Hola crafty peeps,

Jaishree this side for prika’s blog today, with yet another mixed media canvas for ya’ll.

This canvas was inspired by love for music. If you know me, you would know If I am not crafting or even when I am crafting I am listening to music. And with everything digitized now, I thought of giving an ode to the beautiful accompaniments of the past – Cassettes and CD’d.

So, without further ado, lets dig straight into the project.

First of all, I started with applying texture paste with the help of this beautiful musical notes stencils from craftangles and let to dry.

Next, I gathered all my elements – cassette, CD, earphones, some charms to make my focal point.

I covered them all with black gesso. (I added a tinge of white acrylic paint in it to make the color a little greyish)

Using my favorite net stencil, I applied texture paste on the cassette.

Once dried, I used texture crackle paste and applied thick layers for bigger cracks on the edges of both cassette and the canvas.

After the crackle paste dried on the canvas, I covered the whole canvas with black gesso.

Next, I assembled all the elements together and pasted them with the help of heavy body gel medium.

I added the earphones all around the CD and added some mini art stones around it to add some grainy texture and a shabby rustic look.

To make the whole canvas look the same I covered the art stones with black gesso as well.

Now the fun part begins! Yes, the coloring of the canvas. This is where one can experiment and try new things with various colors at hand.

As I said I wanted a rustic look, I started with poppy red impasto paint color. I dry brushed it on the whole canvas. I added a tinge of burnt sienna next.

I didn’t like the overall look with this color so I went ahead with cobalt blue and lemon peel yellow color to give the project more depth. But again, this color was too dark for my liking, so I dry brushed it with Azure, which is a lighter tone blue. This helped me highlight the stenciled background of the canvas.

Post the coloring and achieving the right tone for my canvas, I used metallique waxes in the color aged brass and rose gold to highlight all the elements of the canvas, including the stenciled background.

To give more character to my project, I made sound waves with the help of white acrylic paint on both the sides of the embellishments.

Lastly, once everything was dried, I dry brushed with white heavy body gesso only on the background. This helped me enhance the stenciled musical notes in the background and tone down the background’s color letting my embellishments in the focal point stand out.