Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring - FINISHED!

Hallelujah!

In case you aren't familiar with this piece allow me to enlighten you. I was given this canvas last December by the worship pastor at our church.

Original canvas

He asked me to create something along these lines. Hymn pages, music and doves. So I set the canvas aside and went with a board because I knew my surface would need to be pretty sturdy to hold what I had in mind.

Panel with first layer of carved dove.

 After I carved the dove, I dyed some of the pages from the hymn Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring brown and red with food coloring. I attached them to the board with a combination of glue, water and some tinted stain I had left over from another project.

Dove attached to board.

I got "stuck" many times on this project trying to figure out what to do next... most of the time I was just over thinking things. I decided to paint a landscape in olive trees on top of the dove in oil paint.

Dove with olive trees.

At this point, I decided it was too busy so I tried to flatten the painting with some simple stenciled white doves.

Here I became stumped again and decided to try photo shopping a few different ideas on the photo that I took with my phone. I like using photo shop because it allows me to work out different ideas to see how the painting could look.

Option 1: Removing the top layer of the carved dove.

Option 2: Shellacing (made up that word) the whole painting.

Option 3: Shellacing the whole thing and repainting some of the stenciled doves in an off white color.

I ended up going with a hybrid of Option 1 & Option 2 choosing to remove the top latyer of the dove and then shellacing the whole thing.

Ready to shellac!

Note: Shellac is one of my favorite things in the world. Basically it is a sealant that you can put on any wood. I like to use Shellac though because I can buy it in this tinted amber color. If you want to know how obsessed I am with Shellac check out my portfolio on my website any painting that has a shiny amber look to it... most likely is covered in shellac.

Shellaced the whole thing!

The only thing that remained was to build a frame. I love frames I think they give a painting a nice clean finished look that you just don't get from a bare canvas edge. In this case the painting also needed a frame in order for it to hang. This painting will also need about 20 wall anchors and D-Rings because it is HEAVY.

Doneskies!

Here it is complete and ready to go! So glad this is done and so excited to give it to our pastor. I enjoyed doing this painting and I learned alot about how I work and why I work through it. I'll explain later but for now enjoy the photos!