live,laugh,love

 Steampunk was never my scene, but having played with the steampunk butterfly stamps, I fell in love with the roses, and treated myself to the punky hearts set of stamps in the recent Chocolate Baroque sale as that had more roses.......I also got a stencil (among other things) and felt that I really had to use them.

Having bought some canvas boards after making my first ever canvas at a Clarity East workshop

I went totally wild and made a canvas using the lovely colour scheme from the CB Colour  challenge 20.
Throwing caution to the wind, I used brusho powders for the background, reasoning that I had a load of white gesso to cover it up with if it didn't work! I just sprinkled red, orange and yellow over the canvas board and sprayed it with water. It looked fine wet, but the colours faded to a pastel when it was dry, so I added more red and spritzed it again and let the colour dribble down.
The cog stamp from the butterfly set was randomly stamped in grey as a background.
The rose was stamped twice onto a sticky label and the heart once, coloured with promarkers and cut out. I stamped the heart in black memento onto the canvas to give me the key, to save some fiddly cutting out. Using the stamped image as a guide, I stuck the cutout roses down, and then the cut out heart over the top.
I lined the words of the stencil up on the left of the canvas, and stencilled them with what I thought was a white embossing paste - it turned out to be pearlised translucent, which didn't show up at all well when dry! A quick recovery job, line up the stencil again and sponge black archival ink through - it didn't do the stencil any favours, but at least I could see the words!
Dark brown acrylic paint ws roughly brushed round the edges to finish - I was quite pleased with how it turned out in the end