Painted ipad Bag

I have been wanting to buy a case for my 'new' ipad, but have held off because I read the ipad 2 cases didn't work with the new ipads because they moved the magnet that puts it in sleep mode when you close the cover and there aren't that many options in covers for the new ipads yet, so in the mean time I've had nothing to protect it when I'm not using it and need to transport it.

I decided to sew a simple bag from canvas with a piece of thick wool felt sewn into it as a cushioned liner. I had no intentions of doing anything fancy, just a simple temporary bag that was purely utilitarian. This did the job and suited me just fine... for a few days.

But the lure of that blank canvas was too much.

I pulled out a few printed tea bags, abaca paper and matte gel medium and glued a few images down.

Then I painted a layer of clear gesso over the whole bag. Gesso is a way to prep the canvas for paint and clear gesso would not cover the printed images the way white gesso would.

Using acrylic inks, I brushed on some random color. When I build up layers of painted imagery, I like to start by putting down some primary colors, mainly warm yellows and cool red, because when I paint blues over them I'll get greens and purples. I especially like yellow as a base color because it is light, bright and transparant and I can always go darker with layers of color over the top.

With pencil I drew a few images on the canvas, white pencils are always nice if you can't see pencil lines very well.

Then I painted the background with deep blues and turquoise. You can see some of the colors are translucent letting the printed images and color from below show through and some of the colors, like the turquoise, are opaque.

 I used a black sharpie to give more definition to the simple graphic shapes

I still havent decided on what kind of closure if any I'm going to put on the bag, for now I just fold it over and that works fine.