fish picture 19 progress and some other stuff

Hello Readers!

We'll just get right to it today.  I've been working on FP19 and progress is afoot! 

 After two days of making and putting all this stuff on the canvas, fish picture 19 is well on its way to complete.

I'm going to ramble on for a little while here about all the stuff on the canvas if you are interested in the process of how this came to be.

As is always the norm with fish pictures, there isn't a picture of the canvas before I started.

I painted the canvas green after I had covered it in two layers of book pages. Just plain old acrylic wall paint. I painted the darker green, let it dry for a bit and then drizzled a light mint green all over the dark green. 

Hopefully your monitor is showing the background as green. On mine, it looks more goldish than green. At any rate, it's green. Everything is green just about....  I took some puff paint in two different shades of green and 'drew' some vertical lines resembling seaweed. While everything was still a bit wet, I sprinkled a dusting of dark green glitter over it all.

Once that is done it is time for some rocks.

I usually use styrofoam chunks for rocks on the fish pictures. But time was of the essence in this matter and there was not time to do styrofoam rocks. They must be painted numerous times in different shades to make the styrofoam magically turn into rocks. So I went with the next thing I could think of and used a few different types of paper for the rocks.

 I selected four or five different varieties of paper from my stash. I tried to keep them all in the green/yellow family as I had decided this fish picture would be green.

 I wanted them all to be coherent to one another in their color so I smeared some chalk pastels all over them and waded them into balls of appropriate size.

 And glued them to the canvas in a random pattern along the lower half of the canvas. I was a little heavy handed with the white pva glue. I ended up with a puddle of glue, filled with dark green glitter, on the kitchen floor when I woke up the next day. No biggie. It will come up.

I would have used the hot glue gun, but I couldn't find a hot glue gun that would work properly at the time I was gluing the paper rocks on. 

I had to find a hot glue gun if this fish picture is going to get done!

 These are little paper balls that will go into nooks and crannies once we start adding things to the rock shelf.

 Making the components for the reef is the most time consuming part of this. I don't know how to tell you how I choose what will end up on a fish picture other than I generally decide on a color scheme and I usually stick pretty close to it. I went through my stash of strings...yarns, threads, things of such..and took out all the green stuff. The stuff in the picture above is cording that is sewn around the edge of a decorative pillow. I took some copper wire and wound it around a length of the cording. The other thing is a piece of satin cloth that does have a bronze sheen on it, but it is green. I formed it inot an organic shape and wired it together.

 I sit in front of my computer watching YouTube videos while I make these things. This one is some scrap felt that I wired into a plant like shape and added a green plastic bead  to it. I made three of these for the canvas. 

 Most fish pictures have several different crocheted things. This is satin fabric from a vest that I cut into thin yarn and crocheted into these shapes. I did six or seven of these but only a few made it onto this fish picture. The others went in the box of fish picture parts for a future fish picture. These are actually a very very dark green color, not black.

 You all are thinking, 'what the devil is that?' More felt plant thing-a-ma-bobs. for some reason when I was on the pickle kick sometime back, I cut out a bunch of peanut shaped felt pieces to sew into pickles. That only happened with three of the pieces, and that pickle is still not finished. I sewed the peanut shaped pieces into these things. 3 of them

 Beads are always a part of fish pictures. These are strung on copper wire. There's another crocheted domahickey, some loose beads and a woven ball made from the beginnings of a reel of 8mm film.

I haven't shown you ALL the components I made for fp19. You'll see the whole shebang in a bit.

 Here I've started adding things to the rocks.

I found a glue gun out in the storage shed. That glue gun sucked! I used it until I just couldn't stand it any longer. I drove to town to the Dollar Store to see if they had one. The Dollar Store was my best bet for what I needed. They did not have any glue guns that I could find. 

Ma saved my hide! I stopped at her house on my way home from town and she had a brand new one in the cabinet out in the garage that she gave me. It came with a glue pot as well! Bonus! Not that I used the glue pot. I didn't, yet.

 Some more things for the canvas. The light green 'sticks' are cardstock cut to that shape and then painted green. There were twice that many of them. I didn't paint the others this color of green. they were painted a darker green and then covered with the stuff in the little white box. That stuff being scraps of embroidery thread, yarn and the like. I always save the thread ends. I went through that little baggie of thread snippets and dragged out all the green and the white ones. Along with the green and white ones came a few other colors too. Just enough for a hint of color once I cut them all into tiny little snippets so I could glue them to the chipboard.

The white and gold things up at the top are christmas balls for floral displays. I used a few of the white ones. Cut the wire off and hot glued them on.

The light green fabric is a scrap of silk. It got cut up into a few pieces and stuffed into the rocks here and there.

I didn't use the bronzy green strings. That's the same material from earlier though.

 A mushroom box full of some of the stuff used. The white things are crocheted beaded organza trim. 

The light green strings in the lower right corner are seams from a tshirt I cut into yarn sometime back. Little paper rocks, the pillow cording and a crocheted doodad. The green and white strings in the upper left corner are crocheted baker's twine that I did not use on this fish picture.

 These are origami units from a bucky ball I made a few years ago. The bucky ball was about the size of a soccer ball. It collapsed because of the humidity. The paper used to make the units came from a university year book from 1973. I slapped on some green ink so they weren't quite so white. Some of them already had green from the year book pages on them.

I didn't use the stringed pearls on this fish picture, though I had intended to if need be. They'll show up on a future one, I'm sure.

 These are the sticks with the cut up thread glued to them. The other thing is the cut offs from cutting out the chipboard for the fuzzy sticks. I gathered them all together and wired them. Then I slapped on some green ink.

And after a few hours of putting this here and that there and rearranging and fiddling with things, we have this.

I'll be back soon....like later today....with another installment of fish picture 19 progress. The fishes are done as I write this. All that is left to do is adhere the fishes and a few more strings and I will call this done!

Thanks for hanging in to the end!

Remember...

Be kind to one another!

It matters!

Peace

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