Magical Fairy by Magical Riikka

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Get ready to meet a Magical Fairy created by our Magical...

Hello and greetings from Finland!

I'm so delighted to share my first post here at Mixed Media Place! Although I'm a scrapbooking girl, I went with a canvas for this post. It's an idea that has been evolving in my head for some time now and the DT post gave my courage to try out my wings.

Ever since I made some miniature paintings on brooches this fall I have had a yearning to do a bigger piece with same style - a portrait of a woman using mixed media and collage. I'm not much of a drawer, but I wanted to try what I could come up with and just started creating. The project actually captured my attention so completely that I was almost late for my work!

You can see some step by step pictures from the collage I made. I simply started by drawing the portrait on the canvas with a pencil and then colored it pretty roughly with acrylic paints.

Then I started building up the layers that make her hair - first some leftover alphas and then all sorts of ephemera that I store in my "mixed media" drawer. After giving the hairdo a gesso wash, I started bringing the colors in.

I was planning to use my favorite color scheme - turquoise, blue and green, but when she was all white haired, it seemed to me she didn't want to wear blue but instead pink, so I used pink together with touches of yellow. I first used Talens watercolors, then added spritzes of mist to the mix and finally added a soft coloring on top with PanPastels. I also used some alcohol markers to draw in a few details.

I'm really happy that I tried to put my ideas into action after pondering about the creation for so long. And after my canvas was finished I started having all sorts of new ideas - maybe I just need to try them out, too!

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