Weekend 4 at Cicada Moon Workshop ~ repurposing a thrift store canvas

Posted in cicada, collage art, diy art, full moon, repurpose, thrift store canvas By raen1111 0 comments

It is has been a beautiful weekend here in Lawrence ~ busy and good. But there is always time to make a little bit of art. This weekend I am going to re-purpose a canvas my husband picked up for me at the thrift store. I wanted to create an homage to the cicada, to summer, to slow nights in the twilight filled with cicada song. When Ella was little, she loved to wander around the neighborhood collecting the shells left behind by these strange-looking, summery insects. I still have a jar of the shells I keep in my workshop.

Always room for cicadas in my house :)

The French consider the cicada to be good luck, and I suppose my daughter did as well. And now, the thought of cicadas and their welling, summer song fill me with joy and sweet memories.

So, this weekend, an homage to the cicada ~ to the full moon ~ and to seizing the moment and making our life in an image we find pleasing!

Some music in the background ~

1. Here is the canvas my sweet husband picked up for me:

2. I tapped craft paper over my desk and on the wall I propped the canvas up against.

3. Got my paintbrushes out and some black and white acrlyic paint.

4. I knew I wanted a full moon image in the design and pulled this image of the web:

5. I pulled it into Powerpoint, cut the moon image out using the photo edit functions, enlarged it to fit on my paper and printed it onto vellum.

6. I also pulled cicada images of the web, pulled them into Powerpoint and printed them out onto vellum. Then carefully cut them out with small, sharp scissors.

7. Okay, with my moon and cicadas ready I went to work with my black and white paint on the canvas.

I just painted by dipping in and out of the white/black until the canvas looked how I wanted. Then I painted a thick black strip in the upper-right of the canvas to create some "dripping".

I painted a white circle, the size of my vellum moon so that the moon would stand out when affixed to the canvas.

A little help from my friends :)

8. I affixed the moon to the painted canvas using these plastic/rubbery bumpers I found at the hardware store, I stuck them to the canvas and then used a dot of E600 glue to affix them to the vellum. This gives the finished project a 3-D effect.