Joanna Grant Mixed Media Art: Collaborative Art With BETTY FRANKS KRAUSE

Finished Project

Hi again friends!

Here's yet another of my collaborative art projects, this time with the talented Betty Franks Krause. Betty is fairly new to mixed media art but she has taken it by storm. She has a wonderful style and color sense and our work is very complementary, I think.

In the next photo you'll see the 8 X 10 wrapped canvas that Betty sent to me to work on. Here's what it looked like when it arrived.

I was very happy to see a purple and pink theme to start with! Also, Betty had used some tissue or other lightweight paper in her work which gave the surface great texture to start with. The scan actually doesn't do justice to how good this piece looked to start.

First, I decided to deepen the colors by adding some more purple acrylic paint, dabbed on the sides and front with a sea sponge. I wanted a rich purple color. I also added some neon pink acrylic randomly around the canvas, along with some light pink, which I streaked on by coating the edge of an old credit card in paint and dragging it haphazardly across the canvas.

Next, I used some heart-shaped acrylic stamps (each about 2" across) and stamped a bunch of them on some scrap tissue paper. When the ink had dried, I took some liquid watercolors in magenta, orange and yellow and loosely painted the tissue paper. When the paint was dry, I cut out the hearts and using gel medium, glued them randomly around the canvas. This is a favourite technique of mine because the tissue paper just melts into the background leaving only the image as another layer to the art.

Next, I outlined the hearts with a black grease pencil and smudged them for a grungy look.

The next step was to choose a central image for the piece. I had recently made the collage figure you see below. She was made from a couple of different pieces. Her head, hat and collar are one piece (recycled from an old catalog) and her body is a separate collage element. I loved that she carries a paint palette in her hands. How appropriate for this project! I mounted the image on hot pink paper and cut her out with a skinny border so that she'd have a bit of an outline and stand out against the canvas. Then I glued her to the canvas with gel medium.

In the bottom left you'll see where I stamped the word "Illusion" onto a scrap of tissue paper and then adhered it to the canvas.

Now, I felt I was getting close to being done. I love to use dangly hearts and stars in a lot of my work lately and felt that this would be a good idea for a way to finish off this piece. So I drew a few small hearts on either side of the central image and painted them with a lovely sapphire blue color (Silks acrylics). You can't really tell from the photos, but it is a bold shimmery jewel tone. This photo only shows one coat of the Silks, but I ultimately did two coats to get opaque coverage. Fabulous!!

And lastly, I added some salvaged sparkly doodads for the hearts to hang from. They are a shiny metallic blue. A coat or two of sealant and I called this piece done! Here are some close-up shots of each quadrant of the piece.