Put A Bird On It!

Have you ever watched Portlandia?  I have, and laughed right out loud several times -- that doesn't happen very often.  Anywho, there's one skit where they satirize the recent bird trend (watch it here if you want).   Birds are everywhere now-a-days, and I guess I've jumped on the bird bandwagon because I woke up one day with an image in my head of a piece of art I wanted for our house -- birds and all!!

Originally I was just going to paint on canvas, but the canvas I had in my stash had a rip on the side, so I had to come up with something else.  I remembered a blog tutorial I saw about modge-podging old book pages onto a canvas.  I can't remember where I saw it, or I would include a link.  Anyways, I put the book pages down, then painted, glazed, white-washed, and antiqued over the pages until I got the look I wanted.   Here's what the canvas looked like after that:

Then I painted on the birds (I put four birds on it!), our names, and used glue and red glitter for the hearts.  The finished project looks like this:

I'm planning on re-vamping this shelf area to make it look less cluttered and cleaner.  The painting will probably stay, but the rest will go.  I have another art project to complete to add to the shelf.  I might place one or two knick-knacky things up there as well, but the rest will go.  I don't have time to re-vamp right now, but I'm sure I will post a picture when it's done.  I mostly just wanted to share my completed painting -- Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman would be so proud!