Black and gold, with sparkles!

The husband's studio, like the majority of rooms in a house, has four walls.

One wall has a window, which I made these curtains for ...

One wall has two doors - one closet, one enter/exit, and two blank walls. On the south wall we've taken care of the art issue with the previously blogged about Angel. On the space between the door and closet he has hung my Prophetess painting ...

This left the last wall, the north wall, empty and in need of attention. Lots of debate has gone on about what to put there. My suggestion was a nice table and a big amethyst geode cathedral like this ...

I really like the geode!

I made a few other suggestions, but none met with any enthusiasm on the part of the husband. Then, several months ago, he came up with an idea for a piece of art. Considering the months of struggle with the Angel, I wasn't all that thrilled with the prospect of another special request. His idea: a painting of his music pseudonym, Au. This, for all you non-chemistry heads out there, is from the Chemical Table of Elements for Gold. Okay, I could work with that. Of course, he had to throw a kink in it ... he wanted the letters to be embossed. Argh.

I had to stew on it for awhile. What was the best way, with the tools I had available to me, to create large, gold nugget-like, embossed letters on a canvas?

Light bulb!

I decided to use a 24" x 24", 1.5" deep gallery wrap canvas which I had previously started to use for an abstract painting. I'd gotten as far as spreading some texture medium on it, but then had to put it away in my studio closet while I worked on the Angel. I pulled it out and painted it with two coats of black acrylic.

I took the Au logo from his CD art into QuarkXPress, sized it, then printed it out via the tiling option. I put the pieces on my light table and taped them together, then cut them out. I used Elmer's Glue on the backside of the letters, sort of reverse decoupage', and stuck them onto the canvas. The glue softened the paper so that I was able to mush it down into the peaks and valleys of the texture medium. Let that dry for a day.

Using the tip on the bottle, I ran a bead of glue all around the edges of the lettering, both sealing them to the canvas and creating a space (once the bead dried enough) I could then fill in with more glue. I repeated this process three times to create about a 1/8" deep layer of embossing. Since I wanted it to have a higher level of embossing, as well as both smooth and rough texture ... like a gold nugget ... I added another 1/8" or so layer of texture medium with a small, pointed putty knife. I worked the medium to be rough, but then went back over it in areas with the flat of the putty knife to give it the smoother areas. I also knew the medium, being applied so thickly, would crack as it dried, giving more texture. Had to let all of that dry for about a day with a big fan blowing on it.

It surprises people to find out that I don't have expensive acrylic paints like Winsdor & Newton or Liquitex. What I use is those little, cheap-o bottle of craft acrylics. The kind you'd think to use for painting Tole or that awful One-Stroke stuff. They come in a huge variety of colors, which I think is marvelous! Yeah, they are liquidy, unlike the way tube acrylics are heavy-bodied and squirt out like oil paints or toothpaste. I'd love to have some of those thick acrylics but I just can't afford them. So I do what I gotta' do, ya' know? The liquid acrylics work for me because I paint them like watercolors, just using glazing medium instead of water.

I pulled out a few of the gold paints I had and decided on Antique Gold because it looks more like 10K gold, what mine and the husband's wedding bands are made of. I'm not fond of bright gold, like the 24K stuff. It doesn't look "real" to me. Yes, I know that sounds strange. It took two coats of the antique gold to cover the embossing. I had to pay attention and make sure I got it in all the nooks and crannies. Any place I 'slipped' had to be touched up with black paint.

Once the paint was dry, I used a gold glitter paint, with a extra-fine cut glitter, on some of the rough areas of the embossing. I left some places with just one coat and other places I used two or three coats to get the right amount of sparkle. Next, I grabbed the Elmer's again and put dabs of glue in some of the deepest cracks and ridges, then sprinkled on some large cut glitter. Messy, but I wanted small touches of 'rough sparkle' on the lettering so that it would better catch the light better when you walked past it. The final step was to use the fine cut glitter paint on a few places on the texturing of the black background. Just to highlight it a bit and keep it from being too stark and bland.

This is the end result ...

Now I have to put wire on the back and hang it up!

Namaste', y'all ...