Welcome to today's Guest Designer, Coco !

Hello ! Today we are welcoming Coco of Chez Coco as our Guest Designer. Coco was chosen by the DT as the winner of the Tic Tac Toe challenge and was therefore invited to join us for a day as Guest Designer.  Before we move on to hear from Coco I would just like to say a huge thank you to our followers who have now reached 200 ! This is fantastic !

So now it's time to hear from Coco.

Hello everyone. I was absolutely delighted to be invited by Sue to guest here at Stamps and Stencils. The team is uber-talented, and the tutorials are always great, shared works often incredible. This is a real opportunity for everyone to learn new techniques, be inspired, and experiment more and better!

My name is Corinne, but I am more known as simply Coco – my nickname - on Craftyblogland, or Cocofolies. I am a French self-made wanna be artist at heart, and a free-lance teacher and demonstrator in Mixed Media art in my area since early October, 2015. A dream come true. Working full-time with my stamps, inks and paints in my messy room, with a good cup of coffee near me makes me just so happy!!!
I live in beautiful France, Brittany. I have had 5 children, one boy and four girls (which take so much of energy!!), and happily, I have also a wonderful husband to give a little bit of help! I’m so thankful to him. Without his support, I would not have been able to fulfill my dream.
My style is detailed, colourful, sometimes a bit quirky and often whimsical, which is my world basically maybe. I always pay a lot of attention to the details, loving them.
I am very proud to have been designing for Crafty Individuals for several years now. I also love experimenting and sharing tips, techniques and ideas wherever possible on my blog, Pinterest, FB and IG social networks. Thank you so much for the honour today to share with you a little piece of my own artwork, as I have really enjoyed creating this canvas, loving the colours of Autumn so much! 

I started with a plain cheap 12x12 canvas, as I  had no idea at start where my steps would lead me...

I first painted my canvas with titan buff, then roughly brayered over it a bit of Gesso and yellow. Burnt Umber and Sierra paints, also some Iridescent copper lightly, were added on the edges and blended using my fingers and a baby wipe.

For the base, I used tissue paper (Kleenex) and had fun to stamp in black onto several sheets a lot of leaves from various rubberstamp brands, I used mainly a wonderful leaves background stamp and some other fantastic texture stamps (among them the trees) by Chocolate Baroque, and a great foliage by PaperArtsy, designed by Darcy Wilkinson. Everything was glued with gel medium, overlapping sometimes a few leaves on tissue paper at some areas (but heat set the first piece a bit before!). Using Kleenex for this technique may be viewed as difficult since it is a delicate paper, but what is fantastic with it is that it merges wonderfully, it almost totally disappears on support underneath and dryes clear. It is a wonderful way of integrating images on textured parts.  Most of you know that well probably, but we never know, the tip can be useful for some others maybe! 

My leaves, foliage and trees were colored with Neocolor II pencils and a few Faber-Castell Big Brushes and small ones too. 

I used extra heavy gel to adhere my distressed lantern die-cut in grungeboard, I had so much fun altering it!!! For the luminous globe, it was covered first with frosted film and painted in white at the back side, as I had learned from Brenda Brown on her blog Bumblebees and Butterflies last year... I really wanted to give it a try, but had no occasion to use this TH die so far, so perfect this time!

I have just one photo at intermediate stage to share…

However, I have a few pics on how I made my 3D butterfly:

First, I chose a lovely stamp set by Darcy Wilkinson from my PA stamps collection, this one comes from EDY19.

I started to colour the wings of this wonderful butterfly with Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylics in the shades you can see on the photo above.

 
Then added some blues lightly on its body, for a nice contrast… 

Finally decided to play also with my Silk Acrylic Glaze paints, as I wanted to make it sparkle more. I knew it would seek the light and be very close to it...

I made two, just because I was not too sure of the colours!!
Since then, I have put the second one in a spread in my Nature Art journal, on which I have also applied my leftover paints.

You can see above on the right pic how fun Darcy’s flower is, with the little eye I created with a dot of black enamel... My flower is also bended, looking at the lantern and luminous globe of course!
Added to it a few dots and strips of white acrylic pen to highlight it… I just love the unique flower I have created here, beautiful I feel.

Now for the mushrooms :

I chose the fabulous couple of mushrooms from PA JOFY37 stamps, these are so cute !!!  

I used the same technique as before to stamp and adhere them on my canvas, bending them a bit more than normal to look in the direction of the light too. But I wanted extra texture... Thus I applyed a thick layer of modeling paste over their heads with a palette knife. I gently tapped into the paste directly with my finger, just for fun and creating here a bit of texture.

When dry, added some crackling definition, with the help of Distress Crackle Paint in Clear Rock Candy… I was not totally satisfied yet, so I painted over them, applying several layers of paints and DecoArt antiquing creams in white, black and grey, wiping back every layer after a few seconds, and finally adding Metallic lustre from DecoArt too in Polished Coral. You can not see it well, but the final texture is fabulous!! This has been a quite long process, but well deserved the time as I love to bits the result!

At the bottom, you can admire also the fabulous new Tim Holtz twisted edges!! I received them lastly from the Funkie Junkie boutique, and I’m totally under the spell… You can also use, like I did, a few parts torn up from the remaining parts; I glued them here and there, in any direction.. Just to simulate some quirky leaves buffeted by the wind… like under the spell too.
I also brushed half circles of brown pain in various senses to accentuate this movement.

The main quote is from the same stamp set as the butterfly. The second one ’Turn your face to the sun and the shadows will always fall behind you’ comes from another one, EDY10. And a last close-up..

Maybe you can catch on my photo that there is also a touch of glitter in this scene ... I poured a bit of white and gold DecoArt Glamour dust in the vertical line under the lantern, like if a bit of magical light was falling from the white glass luminous globe... A few pinches were also added at the top in some areas, just before I decided to also apply some Stampendous frantage bronze enamel on parts of the edges (and a bit on the trees too). I used my Versamark pad, and everything heat set slightly at the same time.

Some Metallic lustre and Treasure Golds finally added on all edges for the finishing touch. Et voilà!

Hopefully you will now feel even more inspired to create your own Autum mixed media project and share it here at Stamps And Stencils. I really enjoyed working on mine, using these warm colours that I love!!! Huge thanks to Sue and the Design Team for inviting me to be their guest this month. It has been an absolute joy.

  A big thank you to Coco for sharing her beautiful project with us, you now have even more inspiration to join in with the current challenge which is The Colours of Autumn.