DeborahAPierro's Mixed Media Art Blog: Embellishments of all Kinds in Your Mixed Media Art

Mixed media artists use all kinds of embellishments to create art. The following butterfly was originally created on a piece of cardboard that I cut out, covered with tacky glue, and then sprinkled with varying colors of beads. Much later, I glued it onto a canvas board with tacky glue. Then I decided that the butterfly needed better wings, so I pencil sketched the bluish-parts, put down tacky glue, and sprinkled the wings with a blue bead mix. After some drying time, I just tap off the excess beads onto the towel that I do my beading work on and then put them in a container of mixed colored beads. I use the mixed colored beads for other projects.

I followed a similar process for the rooster, although I sponged on gold metallic paint for the background. I found that my rooster was off-center, so I added the beaded diamond shapes to balance it out. I gave this as a Christmas gift to my mother a couple of years ago. That's a great thing about making your own art pieces ... you can give them as gifts to appreciative loved ones!

These next two pieces have these types of embellishments: my own photography, stickers, pieces of art that I cut out from my own designs or doodles, pieces of stained glass, a piece of broken mirror. I love to do mosaics using stained glass, sea glass, and broken mirror pieces. I named the first piece below "Spiritual Garden" and the second piece below is just a mosaic that I gave to my sister as a house gift. On second thought ... I think I should have added more stained glass pieces so there wouldn't be so much white background.