"Proper" Art!

Just lately, I've been doing more and more drawing... and remembering that I actually used to be quite good at it.

 

I've been thinking for ages about making an original canvas - as in drawing a design from scratch. With my new venture in making and selling my own digi stamps, and my recent re-addiction to ATCs, I've been rediscovering my drawing mojo and so last weekend I finally took the plunge and had a first go at making my original canvas:

 

 

I used a pre-prepped canvas board and drew the image onto it, then painted in the image and the background and added inks and texture gels and embossing paste and gilding paste and built up patterns and texture and highlights.

 

It's not perfect but for a first go I am fairly pleased with the results.

 

It has a lot of texture and shimmer that the face-on view doesn't pick up:

 

 

 

I'm not entirely happy with the shading on the face but hey, practice makes perfect, right?

 

Much as I love papercrafting and stamping and the like (and I still totally do!), I feel like this is quite an exciting step for me, creating my own original art from scratch, all completely drawn and coloured etc by me, rather than working with other people's images, in the form of stamps or papers etc. It feels like "proper" art, if that makes any sense?

 

I'm already planning my next canvas... a bigger one this time, I think... :)