hummingbird

This week’s challenge over at The Craft Barn is animals and prompt # 243 in the Embrace your art 365 is use a magazine picture.

So I took a National Geographic magazine and browsed for an image that spoke to me and this hummingbird did.

Then I got started with the background, I had seen a  nice background in one of my art books, to reproduce this I needed to mask off some lines and paint the areas in between to resemble sun rays, issue #1 I wasn’t able to reproduce the brushstrokes, so I colored the blocks completely in.

Next I thought black in between the blocks of color would pop the colors even more, so I painted the space in between with black acrylic paint, argh not convinced (issue #2). 

Then I thought maybe I can mask the black with some washi tape, so out came the drawer filled with tape, but no that wasn’t it. But hey,  I had kept the masking tape I had used to create the blocks,

maybe I can use them back, so I placed them back but in different places as before,

okay better, but this page just wasn’t doing it for me, so I took the bold decision to turn the page and start all over.

I had some left over paint on my palette which I scraped on my page with an old credit card, instantly fell in love with the texture and colors of the background.

Glued down the image of the hummingbird which I had torn out and added the following quote with a gold gel pen:

Spread your wings and let your spirit soar.

This page finally got together so smoothly and quickly, I really shouldn’t fight the page, but let it flow.