Button Art

Good morning Bloggers,

Today’s topic will be about a recent creation I made for Zoo’s daughter, who has been ill. It so happens, that Zoo had recently sent me some links into the world of buttons and I decided it would be fun to delve into that for my get-well wishes, and so it began….

I don’t know what the protocol for inserting other people’s links are, but I will do it here so you can see where I came by the inspiration and some of the methods I mention. 

  http://bustedbutton.com/2015/05/18/button-turtle/    and                                      http://bustedbutton.com/2012/01/29/button-tree/   and                                    http://bustedbutton.com/2012/04/27/button-elephant/

Now Zoo’s Kidlet’s favourite colours are purple and yellow and she likes stegosaurus dinosaurs, as well, so I started there. I am not much of an artist so I looked on google images and free handed a stegosaurus similar to one I found there. 

 I began placing purple buttons on the drawing, starting with the bigger ones and filling in the gaps with smaller ones.  To distinguish the body from the spikes I used lighter purple buttons.  When I finished placing the buttons, I was then in a bit of a fix because I had 40 or more buttons on the original drawing and how then do I take them off so I can glue them on. Yes, this is a laugh at myself note for you to take an extra step and trace your figure onto the paper you will be using to secure your button creation to.

 At this point I had to go looking through papers to see where a purple dinosaur would look good living. I found in my folder of paper I had made or manipulated a lilac card stock with texture paste stars on it. This was one done in my first experiments with texture paste and the StampinUp! Stars stencil.

 I then had to take off the buttons and place them in order carefully on a cleared space on my desk in order to trace the dinosaur onto my paper of choice (this step could be avoided if you had already traced it onto the paper to begin with!). I took the advice of one of the bloggers in the links above and I coloured the figure with a purple watercolour pencil crayon and used my aqua pen to paint it smooth. I am not convinced this was necessary, as I can only see a tiny, tiny bit of the purple paint in the finished product. I imagine that if the buttons were see through or the seed beads didn’t reach all the empty spaces it would have been a good idea to have the proper colour under the buttons.

For glue, I ended up using Royal Coat Dimensional Magic. It is a clear liquid that when dries stays raised and see through to accent what is on the paper. I picked it because I hoped the buttons would sink into it and be welded into place. I did not want to do all this work and then have the buttons fall off in a month.

Once I had all the buttons glued into place, it was time to get the seed beads out and get started on them. At the beginning, I was sorting out the pale purple beads out of the mix of all pastel colours. It soon became apparent that it was going to take a lot more beads than I had first thought, and so I stopped sorting the purple ones out and poured the whole colour scheme on. This part in the process shows my lack of patience in the nit picky and I found it a challenge to finish it all in one sitting. However, once I finished the spikes and had some of the darker beads around the body it started looking much better and I was able to complete it. I wanted it to dry flat so I placed it between layers of parchment paper and placed a couple of heavy book on it to dry for a few days.

 It did turn out to be adorable and after trimming the paper, masking it on a darker purple and placing it in a white frame, it took a big plane ride across the country to it’s destination. Over all it was a quick project that I started and finished all in one day. I contemplated leaving the glass off the frame because it felt neat to run my hand over the dinosaur but in the end, I figured it would be easier to keep clean with the glass on.

Have a happy St Patty’s Day tomorrow and happy crafting!

Red Bear : )