Gold Hearts for a Little Lady

Love, love, love this new nursery project:

My client gave me a few instructions for this piece:

large
abstract
use light pink, light blue/mint, gray, and maybe metallic
incorporate hearts
the baby girl has to be able to grow up with it

So I wanted something sweet and feminine but a little edgy, so it wouldn’t always look like a baby’s room.

Luckily this particular mom has a serious eye for style – meet Danielle of LouWhatWear – and she went along with my crazy vision as I tried to explain it!

This piece had a crazy process:

First, I created an abstract underpainting using the client’s selected colors: gray, blue, and pink:

I really liked the abstract painting as it was, but alas – that was not the plan. Onward!

I painted hearts onto the canvas using liquid frisket. In retrospect, this may not have been the best idea… more on that later. The frisket acts as a mask to the underpainting while I apply an overlayer of GOOOOLD.

Yes, gold… lovely, delicate, bright, freakin’ awesome Gold Leaf. I want to use it on everything now.

Then I got curious about taking off that mask of frisket. Here is where I realized my mistake.

Frisket is made for paper, not canvas. It’s kind of like rubber cement, in the way it rolls up and off of the surface. Well, it got down into those canvas grooves, and it was freaking HARD to roll off. Plus, the gold leaf stuck to it.