Watercolour floral canvas

Hi everyone, it's Esther here with a canvas featuring lots of layers and texture. I used watercolour, but, having run out of watercolour ground, I worked directly onto gesso.

I started with adding texture paste in the corners and towards the middle through the My Favorite Things Moroccan Lattice stencil. 

The next stage was adding lots of watercolour using Zig Clean Color Real Brush Pens. I scribbled colour at the edges and spritzed it with a water mister, tipping the canvas and letting the colour run towards the middle. I worked from lightest to darkest, adding less colour as they darkened, and drying in between. As the layers were not fixed, and would start running again when wetted with the next layer, I was patient with adding and repeating colours until I had the look I wanted. Colours used were 036 Light Blue, 042 Turquoise Green, 033 Persian Green, 034 Dull Blue, 038 Peacock Blue, 092 Blue Gray, 090 Gray, 095 Dark Gray and 010 Black.

Using the same stencil, I lightly tapped a damp sponge over the edges that hadn't had texture paste to lift the colour slightly.

To complete the base layer I lightly rubbed Nuvo Embossing Mousse in Cornflower Blue over the raised areas and some parts of the canvas to add a metallic sheen and highlight the texture.

For the middle layer of flowers, I then scribbled Zig pens on my craft sheet, spritzed with water, spritzed some card and mopped it into the beads of colour to get a grey-blue marbled effect on the card. I repeatedly stamped one of the My Favorite Things Funky Flowers using Moon Rock from the Altenew Warm Gray ink cubes set and die cut them using the matching Funky Flower Dienamics. I shaped the edges of the petals upwards and then arranged and glued them in the centre of the canvas using wet glue. A touch more of the Nuvo mousse highlighted the edges and random parts of the flowers.

The large word dies on the top layer are Concord and 9th Wonderful Words dies, cut from card, rubbed over with the Nuvo mousse and mounted on fun foam to make them more sturdy. The smaller sentiment, Dream Big, is from Mama Elephant Labeled Messages, stamped in Lava Rock from the Altenew ink cubes. The arrow is from My Favorite Things I'm Owl Yours and cut with the matching dienamics.

To finish off, I added some splatters of black acrylic paint over it all.

It was fun creating a canvas with supplies you might not normally associate with this! Thanks for stopping by.