Lucky's Crafts: Button Tree

Don't worry I haven't forgotten about the crafts portion of my blog. I haven't been up to anything new right this minute (I have been busy setting up the Christmas tree and decorations), but I do have pictures of a painting that I did a month ago. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest and find most of my inspiration from there. The inspiration for the painting below was from this site http://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-button-tree-0004-monica-furlow.html. I love the idea of incorporating buttons in crafts and art.

Anyways, the first thing I did was create the background by putting dabs of different colours of acrylic paint and then blending them together with a paint brush moistened in water. I use water a lot when I'm painting with acrylic because it makes it easier to manipulate the paint, as well as you get more coverage with the paint which saves money. After the background was dry I used a pencil to draw out the tree. The next step took the longest amount of time (hours and hours and hours and hours, etc.), and that was all the dots of colours that make the leaves part of the tree. As you can see in the first two pictures below there is a mixture of large dots on the outside and small dots on the inside of the tree. The buttons I bought for the tree were all different colours so I wanted to ensure that the dots were also many different colours; I'm pretty sure I used almost all the colours I had in my paint set for this painting. Anyways, for the large circles I figured I would put my nail polish to and alternate use and used the the top of the brush part. The good thing about this was because it is made from hard plastic it was easy to dip it in the paint and dot it on the canvas. For the little dots I used the end of a pencil crayon. After all the dots were completed and dry I painted the trunk and branches portion in black. Then came the fun part........................Gluing on all those wonderful buttons! Well I first placed them before gluing them to make sure I liked the placement. But after that I used a glue gun to glue on the buttons, but realized after many burns and having to pick off glue strings over and over and over again, that it was a bad decision. Next time I would use a different type of adhesive that wasn't such a pain in the butt (and my fingers).

I bought the canvases and buttons from Michaels. The Canvases were on sale for 50% off so they only cost me $25 for 4, the buttons came in a tub (a Tub O' Buttons) and I forget how much they cost.