Prima Canvas Album for Portrait Bug

When Prima came out with the Donna Downey fabric album, I just about jumped out of my skin!  Here's what the original album looks like:

I knew that I had to have one!  So, I was so totally thrilled when Kim at Portrait Bug asked me to play with one for the store.  Yay!  Here's a peek at what I did (though, photos really don't do it justice):

Obviously I used a lot of paint: a mixture of Claudine Hellmuth paints for Ranger, gesso, and watercolors.  Speaking of which, I finally had to say goodbye to my Winsor&Newton watercolors.  I bought them in college for a costume design class. 

Sadly, several of the tubes have dried up over the past twelve years.  So tragic.  This was my first foray into buying art supplies and I loved this set.  But, I have moved on to a set of Koi tube watercolors.  They don't come with a built in palette, like the Winsor&Newton set, so I bought a fabulous little portable palette at my local art shop.  Here are the watercolors and a similar palette...

It's so great for travel.  It just closes right up and nothing spills anywhere.  I love it!

Anyway, the album comes with a mixture of plain canvas pages and page protectors.  I decided to go a little crazy and stitch flowers inside the page protectors, thus creating clear flower pages.  Here's a closeup:

Those flowers are sandwiched inside the page protector.  Cool, right?  I hope so.  Because it was a pain in the you-know-what to get them to stay where I wanted them while I was trying to sew them in.  A major pain.  The clear page looks something like this when it's all finished:

And here's a close up of one of the painted canvas pages:

Finally, the album has a nice fat spine, so I even put a photo right on the spine (certainly makes it easier to identify in my bookcase):

I can't wait to get my hands on another canvas album and try something totally different!

Thanks for stopping by!