Mixed Media Snowflake Commission

I was approached by a friend of mine a couple weeks ago about doing a commission for her wedding anniversary.  She asked for two things- shades of blue in her wedding colors, and snowflakes.  I drew up a few sketches, and once we decided on a the basic idea, I got to work this mixed media snowflake piece.

Boy, this piece is just bursting with texture!

• Creative Embellishments has snowflake chippy’s in various sizes.  I placed several of them on the surface of my blank canvas, then used watered down acrylics to spray some color all over.
• Once the paint had dried nearly all the way, I removed the chipboard.  The paint had dried underneath with a super cool print of the snowflake, marking a pattern on the surface.
• I added some variation by daubing some more paint onto the surface with a sponge.
• The background still needed some sparkle mistiness, so I spread some silver metallic paint on some plastic wrap, and used that to apply the paint to the canvas.
• The chipboard was splashed with color from the first steps, but I added some of the metallic paint to give them more shimmer, then splashed them with a bit more blue.
• Now for some modeling paste!  I knew the basic look I wanted to achieve with the texture I would add, so I used a palette knife and my fingers to apply the paste.
• I added my chipboard snowflakes to the wet paste, and made sure they were embedded solidly.
• After the paste dried, I splashed it with some more fluid acrylic to blend it into the background.
• Once everything was dry, I took some Snowflake Effects paste and added it in certain areas over the snowflakes and texture paste.
• As the finishing touch, I added silver paint over the snow effect to give it a bit of shimmer, and a bit more to the surface of the canvas over the spots of texture I added.

Finished!  I love that the piece looks like gusts of wind and snow.  There’s so much movement, it’s awesome.  I hope the new owner loves it as much as I do!!