Harvinaisen Kaunis Elämä: Finnabair Art Recipe January 2021

I love the rich, sumptuous combination of deep blue and dark brown, with a hint of gold. I was so excited to start with this January Art Recipe theme, I had it all planned out, when I gathered all the materials together; I’d create a large tag with a mystical theme, deepest velvety, royal blue background with lots of gold… Well. You know the feeling when you realise the project has a mind of its own and refuse all collaboration? When you have something specific in mind, but somehow your hands are drawn to completely different choices? When it’s like you had nothing to say to the subject? Yes, that one. It happens to me all the time and I don’t know if it should be good or a bad thing, but I enjoy it enormously. It’s like I’m thrown in the middle of an adventure, seeing myself creating something that I have absolutely no idea what it will end up being. This is one of those creations that needed to be born. I think my subconscious spoke volumes, and I am so delighted to see the result. This Art Recipe was almost if it was made for me, as a healing art recipe.

Instead of starting with the tag I had cut ready, I somehow find myself gessoing a tiny canvas of 20cm x 20cm. As the Art Recipe included tissue paper in the material list, I took blue tone tissue paper and with Soft Gloss Gel attached it to the canvas, making sure there’d be lots of crumbles, folds, and texture in it, and after it was dry, I added gesso over it. I didn’t cover the canvas entirely but left the tissue paper shining through a bit.

Then I took Prussian Blue, Ochre, Burnt Sienna, and Ink Black Liquid Acrylics, with Golden Dragon effect Paste to fulfill the Art Recipe colour theme of dark blue, dark brown, and orange. I played with the Liquid Acrylics, just the way I always do; just let them decide how they like to appear. The marvelous Liquid Acrylics are my absolute favourite medium, as it’s so easy to gain artsy effects with them, almost like watercolours, but much better. I used lots of water and a smallish brush, and draw lines with the paints, sprayed a bit of water, let them spread, and blended the paints a bit with a baby wipe.

Then I added some textured structure in form of a stencil. As I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing anyway but enjoyed enormously whatever I was doing, I played with the stencil, too. I took White Sand Texture Paste and bonked some Prussian Blue and Ink Black and Burnt Sienna Liquid Acrylics into it and splashed a nice dollop of Golden Dragon Effect Paste for good measure. I didn’t mix them much, just a tiniest bit with a pallet knife and with a stencil, added the mixture into the canvas.

After the texture mix had dried, I blended the colouring a bit with the Liquid Acrylics and gesso, to make it visible but not standing out too much, as it was just a dimensional addition to the canvas painting. After that I had to decide how to proceed. What to add to the canvas, although to be honest, it’d be just lovely as it was, an abstract painting. I had just finished off with frames for New Year and had tiny Prima resin frame already painted (live stream I made for Finnabair and Re.design with Prima here, for a tutorial how I altered the frame) and ended up framing a print of a painting by tone of my favourite Finnish artist ever, Helene Schjerfbeck, with it. It needed something more, so I took a largeish Prima chipboard and glued it to the canvas with Heavy Body Gel, painted it with the same texture mix I used for the stencil, and then attached the frame on top, again with Heavy Body Gel.

The canvas needed just a little something more, and so I added three mechanical butterflies into it, like they were flying off from the frame, and for balance, added some leaves below. Then I painted them with a mix of gesso and the liquid acrylics, so that they, too would blend into the canvas.

As finishing touches, I gently brushed some Golden Dragon paste here and there, and added Vintage Gold metal wax into the edges of the canvas and the metallic embellishments.

For me, the finished canvas, though small, speaks volumes. It speaks of dawning light after darkness, of gentle rays of hope glittering, and I know why it wanted to be born, a manifest of freedom from somewhere inside me shouting out, and I smile.

MATERIALS USED:

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-alchemy-liquid-acrylic-ink-black

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-alchemy-liquid-acrylic-umber

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-alchemy-liquid-acrylic-burnt-sienna

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-alchemy-liquid-acrylic-prussian-blue

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-extravagance-golden-dragon-effect-paste

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-finnabair-tissue-paper-wilderness

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-finnabair-stencil-vintage-wallpaper

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-basics-heavy-gesso-white

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-basics-soft-gloss-gel

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-basics-heavy-body-gel

https://mixedmediaplace.com/prima-art-alchemy-metallique-wax-vintage-gold