By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Jamaica Inn and more

Hi, this is my design for the March Clarity Challenge, Anything but a Card.

This is my first foray into a canvas piece, quite scary at the start, but after getting some grunge paste on and some colour going it started to take shape.

Using Clarity stencils to create my canvas inspired by "Smugglers" there is the sea (a quiet cove), seawall or cliffs and a few fishermans houses topped off with a moody sky and the silvery moon. Various inks were dusted through the ploughed field stencil at the top of the canvas. The sea was added using the Ocean Swirl stencil and grunge paste. The houses were added with extracts of the Town stencil, more grunge paste. The seawall or cliffs were created using the Tangle stencil, yet more grunge paste. Keep washing the excess grunge paste off your stencills before it has a chance to dry on. The moon, which started life as the sun, was added with, yes, more grunge paste through Jo's Bubbles stencil and then it was texturised as the paste was starting to dry.

All this work and yet the only colour was at the top of the canvas through the Ploughed Field stencil. After letting the grunge paste dry, it was time to go in with the acrylics and Clarity brushes. Wow, what fun.
Starting with the gold, dry brush on over the sea, the wall/cliff, and the house walls. Then add some magenta, before the gold has dried to get the blended colours, over the wall/cliff, house walls and roofs. Finally I used the Phthalo Blue, mainly for the sea colouring, added to the house roofs to darken and in the fields in the background behind the houses. There is a lovely path appeared from no where on the right hand side of the canvas just in front of the houses there, fitted the storyline perfectly.

This was when the decision was made about the sky, the "rough plan" was for it to be shades of blue and sun shine ! I wondered if this was a good idea with the sea colour having blue top and bottom ? So rash decision to make the sky darker and the sun would become the moon, yeah. Brushing over the mix of blue and magenta to get the purple effect, did not like how the new moon had turned out, it looked very grubby, covered in the purple colour. Tried the lightening techniques but that just looked as grubby, out with the white acrylic and some punchinella to add some white dots to the moon, big improvement, got a little wild in adding white dots to the canvas in various other places that seemed to benefit from it. (That's what I told myself, anyway). Stand back and assess your creation, still needed some light to lift it. This is where I got out the craft knife, not to cut my canvas up in to pieces, but to scrape off some colour from the grunge paste to add the highlights, this is such fun. Lots of white foamy splashes in the sea and some scratches across the paste. Then further up the wall/cliff to add some highlights, best was on the houses roofs and walls. Finally I had this idea to scrape off colour from the moon, at first I was thinking go for a full moon and take the colour off completely. But I started by making a crescent shape around the edge and loved it. There are crinkles in the moon shape that look like the Man in the Moon face, again appeared from no where. Finally after all the scraping there was some Spectrum Noir pencils to add some shadows around the houses.

Hope that you like it, thank you for visiting, and for all your comments.

Kathy xx