Fishy sneak peek

I am giving you a sneak peek at the whimsical handmade paper fish I created for my next canvas. You'll have to wait for my next Arnold Grummer blog post to see the completed project. Arnold Grummer ROCKS by the way, they are such an awesome company to design for, I just love them!

So back to the sneak peek....I created some fish out of paper pulp and I am going to enter them in ColourArte's monthly challenge #2 which is all about texture. I love this banner they used...

So my little fish are all about texture, first off they are individually created from handmade paper and then they are embellished with stick pins, beading, fibers, and of course, Twinkling H20's.

Each fish has a set of stick pin fins which I added some extra beads to with the help of my other ROCKING company I design for, Helmar Adhesives! I added a little tiny dollop of the 450 to the pin before sliding the beads onto it so I didn't have to worry about them sliding off. 

Each fish has fibers glued and tied onto their tails with seed beads glued on with Helmar's Super Tac glue and then for extra sparkle, a layer of stickles is added over the front half of the beads.

The eyes were so much fun to create, the big blue disks were given to me by a friend a couple of years ago and I never knew what I was going to use them for until now, lol Yes, this is why crafters hoard so many things, you just have to wait until they "speak" to you! I also added seed beads, fibers, stickles, all sorts of goodies around each eye.

I painted the colors - Snap Dragon, Orange Peel, Ginger Peach, Mediterranean Blue and Mustard Green Twinkling H20's on top of each fish which created some wonderful depth and shimmer along with the handmade paper's natural textures!

And one last shout out to Helmar for their awesome, awesome, can't say enough about this product, Liquid Scrap Dots. Not only does the middle stick pin in each set of fins stand out a little more because a dot of LSD was added under the pin's head, but also because each fish is adhered to the canvas with it. The entire canvas has an uneven surface because of the paper pulp so this type of adhesive gets down into the bumps and cracks and fills in the layers allowing for an even surface in which to glue the fish on top of.

The big canvas reveal will be on August 12th for Arnold Grummer and that's also the same week that I will be entering it in our BIG juried art show called Bring Us Your Best. This will be my second year entering it and it's always nerve wrecking just to see if they will accept it into the show itself.