Flower girl canvas in pink

Hello everybody! I wanted to share with you this little canvas wall art I have been working on. Its using some new digital stamps of mine that I designed recently and I wanted to try them out before I put them up for sale. First I designed a cute little girl’s face in a quite cartoony style, inspired a little by Disney. Then I decided instead of hair, why not have some flower blossoms? I think I have seen this idea before but cannot for the life of me think where. So I designed four different simple flowers that could be used along with her. I was going to make a card but would you believe I have no card? So, since I have an abundance of canvases I thought why not?

To start I printed out the face and lots of the flowers onto 200gms paper, which I took out of my sketch book. I used Promarkers to lay down an even base colour and then I used Prisma Colors to add shading and detail. Because I knew I was going to cut out the face I did not worry about colouring inside the lines at all, which is great as you need to work quickly with Promarkers. I’d say the rule of thumb is if the colour looks streaky or blotchy when wet then that is how it will dry. My advice is to really saturate the paper with the colour until it is even and have a piece of scrap paper underneath.

For the main skin colour I used ‘Oatmeal’ and to add a little shading whilst the first colour was still wet I added in some ‘soft peach’ under the chin and above the eyes. Then once the Promarkers had dried I used a ‘beige’ Prismacolor around the outside of the face to add depth and shadow as well as on the neck. In some of the darker areas I blended a touch of ‘burnt ochre’ with the ‘beige’ for a more intense shadow.  I also used the same brown to colour the eyebrows. As for the lips I used ‘deco peach’ for the main colour and ‘deco pink’ for the shading. I used the peach on other areas of the face to add dimension such as above the eyes.

On the eyes themselves I used a 'duck egg' promarker first then coloured pencils. ‘Light green’ on the lightest area, a blend of ‘light aqua’ and ‘electric blue’ for the main colour and ‘violet blue’ to indicate a shadow caused by the upper lid. To add detail I used the three lighter pencils to add little dashes on the iris coming out from the centre of the eye.

I used pretty much the same technique on the flowers. I used ’pale pink’, ‘baby pink’, ‘salmon pink’ and ‘pink carnation’ Promarkers for the base colour of the flowers,  again not bothering  to colour inside the lines since I was cutting them all out. Once the first layer of colour was dry I used the same pens but on different flowers for the centres. I could have done yellow centres but I wanted to stick primarily to a pallet of lovely muted pinks. Then, as I had with the face I added in detail with Prisma Colors in slightly darker shades around the edge of the petals.

Then began the cutting. Lots of cutting. But I needed lots of flowers since I was going to use a 20 by 20cm canvas. If I had been making a card I would have made one smaller than that with less space around the face for flowers.

After I had laid the face and all the flowers on the canvas to make sure I had enough I was able to paint it. I tried various techniques from stippling various shades of pink, streaking the paint but it all looked too much, so in the end I went with a simple light pink all over. I got this by mixing ‘titanium white’, ‘brilliant red’ and ‘rose madder’ acrylic paint.

Once the paint was dry (I used a hair dryer because I’m impatient) I could start piecing it all together. I stuck the face down using double-sided sticky tape and Uhu glue. After placing it in the desired spot and pressing down gently I flipped the canvas over onto a clean surface and pressed down from the back so that it was firmly stuck. Also if you press down too hard from the front you’ll get a saggy canvas and nobody wants that.

Then began the sticking down of the flowers. I started with the large flowers which I stuck down with just the Uhu glue, which is pretty good. It doesn’t cause the paper to wrinkle slightly like other glues can. It’s also pretty good value for money. Then I used some 3mm foam tape from Woodware to stick down the medium-sized flowers to add depth to the piece. For the two types of smaller flowers I used a mix of 3D sticky dots and the foam tape to create different levels of depth. For some of the smallest blossoms I used 2 pieces of the foam tape on top of one another to raise them up even further. I would not recommend the sticky dots, at least not for this project. If I had had some thinner foam tape I would have used that.

Finally I added some small ivory coloured beads to give it that little bit of pop and voila! A pretty pink flower girl.

I hope all that made sense and thank you for getting to the end. I plan on doing more project blogs like this in the future. Now if you will excuse me, I have a date with the vacuum-cleaner *sigh* I hate this part.