3D Canvas Art with Butterflies and Scrapbook Flowers

A fun art project for the kids' room

So I had an old canvas from a failed project a couple years back.  My attempt for this project was for my daughter Zebra to paint circles with water colors and then to deco page them to the canvas and cover the whole thing in epoxy.  I used a thin water color paper and a thick water color paper.  When it came down to mod podging them to the canvas, the thinner paper just wrinkled.  So rather then repaint 70% of our circles, we scrapped the project.

 Choosing paint for your home is a tuff decision.  It's best to paint a 3'x3' square on your walls and then view it in different lighting.  I opted to paint the canvas with one of my paint choices.  I was thinking at the time that I wanted a blue ceiling.  So I painted the canvas and held it over my head, closed one eye and tried hard to imagine.  (Can you just visualize this scene?)

Funny thing was that the water colors I had used in the canvas began to bleed through the acrylic house paint (who da thunk?)  It actually looked really cool and my sister Lisa wanted to hang it up in her house just like that.  I was like, uh no, because unfortunately the glue from the circles really messed up part of the canvas.

 I was going to have to figure out a way to use mixed medium to cover the torn paper glued to the canvas.

 I've been trying to invite more turquoise into my daughter's room so I decided to go a bit fun and funky.  Using my Friskars circle cutter and slide cutter, I cut circles and fine strips out of scrapbook paper I already had laying around (from another abandoned project).

 Target had these three dimensional butterflies for sale that you can attach to your wall with nails and clips.  I thought they were pretty cute and happened upon them while my wheels were turning for this project.  Here is something similar from Amazon with dragon flies:

 Zebra helped mod podge the backs of the circles.

 I noticed that if I dripped the mod podge for a minute before brushing it in, it left a light spot on the canvas which added to the interest of the piece.   We decided to splatter the whole piece with mod podge.

 The colors from the water color bled through the acrylic paint even more after brushing it with mod podge.  In fact I had to be very careful not to leave the flowers blue.

 The butterflies I added using hot glue.

 Looking at the 'flowers' I felt they were missing a little something.

 I decided to add a small pink center.

This piece hangs in Zebra's room and she loves it!  A good use for an old canvas!