Making A Bit Of Progress: Beautiful Butterflies FLY Artwork

Today's Lesson From The Craft Room:  A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has An Answer.  It Sings Because It Has A Song.  -Chinese Proverb

I have been working on a number of mixed media collages for sometime now.  The one that drew me to this quote is not ready for sharing yet...or maybe it is...it is definitely a work in progress!  Maybe I'll give you a peek a bit later in the week.  It began with images of blue jays and has evolved, quite slowly I might add, from there.  Today I decided to pull the piece back out and continue working on it and I felt it needed some words.  So I started looking for quotes about birds and came upon this perfect proverb.  It was exactly the message I needed to hear.  Why do we create art?  Not because we have answers or feel like we are creating the perfect piece.  We create art because we have a song to sing.  There are notes inside of us that need to be expressed.  And so we sing.
I did feel like I made enough progress today on this piece from last week that I decided to share it with you today!  Doris, if you're reading this, I'll be curious about your thoughts on where I'm taking this :)  Let me share with you how I've gotten this far.  It began on my birthday on Oct. 21st!  A friend gave me a gift and the gift was wrapped in beautiful tissue paper.  Once I started working on this piece, I knew the tissue paper had to be incorporated in some way.  So, I took the tissue paper and adhered it to a canvas board using matte medium.  Here is what it looked like after that step was complete:

I decided the pattern was a bit too bold and that it would overshadow the piece I had made, so I took a risk and coated the entire panel with white gesso.  Gesso is great since it is more transparent than opaque.  Here is the panel coated with gesso:

And can you see what else I added????  If you look closely, you will notice that I used the Mostly Vintage stencil to create texture on the panel!  How did I do it?  I held the stencil down and then covered it with flexible modeling paste.  I applied the paste over the stencil using an old hotel room key (very much like using an old credit card) and then lifted the stencil.  I LOVE how you can use stencils for different mediums - not just ink!  I then let the paste dry and started to play around with where I might position the original piece on the canvas.  I started with trying it here:

 

As I was playing around with the placement I decided that the piece needed more color.  So I began creating washes of color - blues and greens - using watercolor crayons and a brush.  Which leaves me with the piece exactly as you see at the top of this post (I have not adhered the original piece down onto the canvas yet - I seem to like it placed more to the left than to the right...but who knows how I'll feel tomorrow!).  I'm not sure where the piece will go next.  I need to sit with it for awhile.  I feel like some sparkle is going to get added to the panel...we'll see.  I'll be sure to let you know where I go next!