I finally finished one of my canvas pieces. Firstly, I took my own advice and stopped working on so many at once! It was hard to focus! I had a lot of trials and frustrations along the way and I’m not sure if I like the finished product but at least it’s finished!
I took a few photos along the way - though I did omit a few of the uglier iterations. Here is the evolution…
I went through some dramas to get the background the way I wanted it. I really liked this (above) but I knew it needed more. This is where the trouble bagan. So I added a tree element:
After adding the tree collage piece (above) I then messed with the background colours and mucked things up a bit but I kept going. I added paper elements as well…
After a bit more playing and frustration it looked like this (above) and I liked the golden background and texture but I had ruined the lovely bird in the process. So I collaged the woman element and some other papers over the bird instead. After drawing in some more of the tree and adding the fountain, I really felt like this was coming together. Which is why I was so annoyed when I tried to outline the woman with crayon to make her stand her from the similar coloured background a little more… and I ended up wrecking her! So, more glue and another element was added to cover that up:
After a bit more work and annoyance, it evolved into the above and the theme bacame “house and home”. Sorry about the glary photo.
Anyway I learnt a lot during this frustrating process. Firstly, you really must be patient and wait for paint to dry before doing another wash or colour or it will soon turn to mud. Muddy colours are very annoying. Unless you are going for that look of course.
Another thing to realise is that no matter what happens you can just keep adding layers and if it really sucks, then you could always gesso over the whole thing and start again. I was very tempted to do this a few times but I decided to persevere, if only to learn something from the experience. 
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