Craft: Freedom to Express Ourselves

I gotta tell you I am enjoying being able to express myself these days.  For so long I have tried to please other people and finally when I realized God made me to be me, not someone else and that He wants me to please Him, not someone else, it’s like I came alive.  A burden was lifted off of me.
As you can tell in this wild craft I worked on today.  And that’s exactly what I did, I went wild and enjoyed every bit of it.
There is absolutely no freehand work in this project at all.  It is all done with stencils and cut outs, paint, wood and a hardboard canvas.  Oh and a staple gun.
Any one can do this, as long as you are not worried what anyone else will think.  Do you like it, did you enjoy doing this?  That’s what matters.  Hopefully though, because I put the word “Believe” on it, maybe someone will think of God when they see it.  I do want to please Him.
1.  Prepare the stretcher strip frame and paint it what ever color you choose.  You can get the strips here for the frame.
2.  Load your brush with a small amount of paint and a lot of water.
3.  Hold your canvas up straight and then run your loaded brush across the top.  If you have it loaded with a lot of water, it will drip and run down the canvas.  Reload and do the same thing again using the same color or a different color if you like.  Continue doing this until you get the desired affect.
4.  Once dry (or not) lay a paper doily  in the center of your canvas (with the center cut out of the doily).  Apply different colors of paint by dabbing all around the doily.
5.  Using a paper butterfly cutout (my daughter has a cricut), lay it across the middle of the stencil doily design.  Trace all the lines.
6.  Pull the butterfly stencil up and work on the butterfly, painting within the lines and painting the traced lines different colors.
7.  Using a stencil for the letters, paint whatever word you would like underneath the butterfly.
8.  Staple to the back side of the stretcher strip frame.
This would make a great gift for  your daughters or grand-daughters for Christmas.  You could put their name underneath the butterfly.
My butterfly really stood out when I put little white dots all around the lines with a paint stick pen.  Try it, it was easy.
Hope you can use this idea, Happy Crafting!

You can purchase a print of this painting by clicking here.