Birdhouse Art Panel

Hello!  I've been thinking about making some collage style wall art, and thought I'd get started simply by working with familiar materials first.

I happened to have a 10 x 10 inch wood panel covered with textured Gesso that I decided not to use for another project, so thought it'd be a good place to start playing around . . . here's where I ended up:

I'm kind of happy with how it turned out.  Although I initially thought I'd be adding 

3D embellishments to it, I decided to wait and work my way up to that :).

I also had good intentions of taking photos every step of the way, 

but as it evolved that sort of slipped my mind.

The short version is that it's a wood panel covered with textured Gesso,

using Distress Ink stains for the background, an ink tint,  sponged A Muse ink,

and water spritzed for variations.  I sketched the birdhouse from the original

rubber stamp illustration, and the other images are Shady Tree Studio stamps

other than the eggs from Crafty Secrets and "Imagine" from CHF.

There's also a text background from A Muse Studio

that I wish showed up a little bit better.  

The birdhouse is hand-drawn and colored with Copics.

Other painting is done with waterbrush and A Muse Studio ink

Here's the first round of the background. 

I started with Distress Ink stain, spritzed, blotted, and used 

the heat gun to speed up drying and move it around.

You can see that at one point some of the background was quite bright!

This photo shows some of the textures a bit better.

The last coloring step was to use the waterbrush directly on A Muse 

ink pads to paint the bird and the birdhouse so they didn't blend

in to the background too much. 

Here's a little detail of the 'vegetation' stamped at the bottom:

And the background script text that I wish I'd stamped a little more boldly:

To me this is the best way to try something new ~ just jump right in and experiment.  I wonder what I'll end up with the next time :) .  

Thanks for coming by!!