Canvas with Wings and Collage Art

This was originally a guest post that I wrote for Michele at The Scrap Shoppe last week...

A couple of months ago I redesigned my craft room and made this piece of art for my wall.

I wanted to put art on the walls that would inspire me so I looked up tons of inspirational quotes. When I found this quote from Emerson it really hit home. And as I read all those quotes I felt uplifted and wanted to try and show that feeling of soaring on inspiration. I started with a canvas and knew from the beginning that I wanted it to hang from a corner rather than the usual direction. I painted it with some acrylic paints, then decoupaged the quote on top. I used craft wire to shape the wings and then hot glued them to the back. I sewed on a layer of tulle and another layer of a sheer lining and then glued a whole bunch of feathers around the outside of the canvas.

My sister loved the quote and asked me to make her one for her office, but a canvas with wings wasn't quite right for her or her office. She also wanted something that she could frame. So after some thought, I came up with this...

It's mixed media: water color, oil pastels, paper collage, paint markers and gel markers. It wasn't as complicated as you might think... you just need to "build" it in layers.

I started with a 12"x16" piece of water color paper and marked off the edges so she could mat it to 11"x14" easily. I played with some water color paints just to start some colors for the background. If you don't have paint, you can start with any great scrapbook paper. Then I copied out the quote in a word processing program and played with the size and font until I was happy with it. I printed it and cut out the words ransom note style and the found some awesome images from The Graphics Fairy. Here you can see the quote and images at this point:

Once I was happy with the layout, I used a glue stick to glue it all down with a few more random pieces cut from magazines and catalogs.

I added some depth to the background with some oil pastels, but you can use markers or crayons too - whatever you like. Just play.

To finish it off, I had fun with some paint markers and gel pens and VOILA!