The Magic Garden Mixed Media Display

 Hello Friends!

I am so excited to show you my newest project. There's a lot of pictures and even a video. 

First-I want to give a little story LOL so I hope you still have some coffee left. It's still the New Year and I usually don't do a word for the year. I have even stopped resolutions because I'm not good at keeping up with them. I make goals but that whenever it happens.

But I saw this challenge. And something sparked in my brain. I knew what my word for the year is-it's Magic. I want to create magic all year-and not the Dark Arts kind more like the Disney World kind. I want to send more cards and happiness to my family and friends. More than last year because last year was navigating this crazy unknown. It's still crazy and unknown but more known you know? LOL. 

And when I read about this challenge-I knew what I wanted to do.  I just hope my idea is translated into my project. :)

So the challenge that inspired this is the Art Daily Cafe (Finnabair).  

I am also submitting this into the following challenges:

613 Avenue Create-#1 Anything Goes

The Fairy and The Unicorn Challenge-Anything Fantasy 

We Love 2 Create: Anything Mixed Media Goes

The challenge is about book and fairytales. And what usually happens in fairy tales-Magic! (And remember I am sticking to the good kind here.) Magic that transports you into a story and you there are princesses and mystical creatures. And maybe a magic garden...

I am going to show you my finished project and then go into how I created parts of it. :)

This is a physical book. And this is where the Magic Garden is :) Complete with Tiny Lights.

Here it is with the lights turned off.

I was inspired by the original structure from the show Make It Artsy 609 by Julie Fei Fan Balzer and Joe Rotella. I had actually tried and didn't glue it well and put it away-until my inspiration hit me. 

So I got my book back out and used hot glue to put it back together. I had tried to use a strong sticky tape but it sort of fell apart. Hot glue (or maybe 3000 if you want to go that route) is the way to go.

If you watch the video-Joe saws a piece of wood for the base. I do not saw or really know much about wood type things so I bought a pack of rectangle wood pieces from Hobby Lobby.  I also bought a round one but it was too big.  I also glued pages together and painted them gold.

I do have a styrofoam cutter and used that on this piece that we got from some sort of packaging that I hoarded away. lol-I knew we would use it! ;)

Here is what the bottom looked like. The styrofoam went over but I think that is ok. I'm not going to put anything really heavy in the space without the wood support.

I used a Paige Evans stencil here.

I used wild honey-I love this color for yellow. And I tried to line the stencil back over-that did not work as easily as I would have liked so I matched where I could and used distress glaze over some of the stars and made new ones. 

I sprayed 3 different distress oxide inks over the opened pages.

Here it is so far.

Here are the colors that I used.

I painted the styrofoam with this golden green paint. And then I start to work on the Cathedral Window die from Tim Holtz. I used cardboard from a box. I made too and cut off the top part to make the window longer. I painted it with ranger white crackle paint.  (love crackle!) I cut a piece of acrylic sheet out and use (Tim Holtz) alcohol inks. Then I glue the top part of the window and the bottom part of the window to match up the middle parts.  I paint over it with crackle paint (which was a little difficult.  light modeling paste may have been easier.) and then I used a little black paint to distress it. Then I glue white cardstock behind it so the alcohol ink colors would stand out and not get lost in the book background.

Here's the finished window, and I just glued it to the book. I need the height. I also used the tallest Tim Holtz Paper dolls.

One of my favorite Finnabair products are the sparks paints and clay molds. So this is a Finnabair moon painted in sparks ginger magic.

Okay-so let's talk about these leaves for a minute. Originally I wasn't going to dress up the "trees" which you may have guessed are sticks from my yard. But somehow when I was looking through my random bits I found these leaves:

How old are the leaves? They cost 39 cents!!?!?! LOL So I used all of them on the tall tree. These are cool because they are soft and have wire stems so I just wrapped each on around. Woo Hoo! Use what you have! :)

Okay moving forward-there are Finnabair mold stars also. This adds great depth to the stars you can see from the glaze and then the muted stars covered by the "sky." I had them painted gold but it just wasn't magical enough so I used Martha Stewart glitter on them. I think glitter is magical :)

So I have random flowers like you see here and random animal figures. They are crafty hand me downs from various people. I don't even know where you would buy them. This turtle was white. So I painted him and added Finnabair vintage gold wax to bring out his shell texture. Also, I drew on his face with a prisma marker. There a bunny in the background and a wolf too.

These little mushrooms are from a Mod Podge mold. I painted them. And I covered the green styrofoam in fake grass and moss. I also had that "bush" in my fake grass box so woo hoo!  Behind the turtle is this squishy fake moss stuff and I hot glued it onto the second tree. I love squishing it! Weird I know.

Here's a side view and there's the wolf.

Lights off. 

Lights on....Magic! :)

Here is my video tour. :) (I'm very new at making videos fyi.)

Thank you so much if you made it this far! LOL.  I hope you have a magical day! :)