Life is What You Make it

Life is what you make it. Wow, that’s another killer statement, huh? I had this idea some time ago with the hearts, which I would arrange like this on a canvas and then place a saying at the bottom right. The ones who know me, are aware that this happens rather rarely with me. I usually do not know beforehand how my card will look like in the end. But you can be sure, even with this project it wasn’t clear before how it will look in detail afterwards. 

Each of these hearts makes its life as it pleases. And look how beautiful this variety is! Yes, I have consciously chosen something very beautiful for each individual heart. And look at what’s going on around the hearts! But also here: these are splotches and doodle circles, but how great and beautiful is this interaction? Life is what you make of it – look around you!

Life is what you make it – and indeed, isn´t that, what we should always remind us of? Yes, it might be hard sometimes, when you are feeling miserable because life gave you a hard time or you need to deal with a tough task. But in the end it is about YOU! You hold the strings in your hands. Your eyes can make the world grey or bright.


I wish you all have the power to realize this every day and especially when you are down.

I started to paint hearts with my LYRA chalks, which I have used so rarely until now. But I wanted something with great bright colours and actually the result is so wonderfully shiny. Thanks to the clearstamps I was always able to estimate the size I needed to paint, because I wanted to stamp the hearts in black on the edges later. I took the colours of the rainbow for my project.

In a second step I mixed the colours with a brush and water and added light and darker areas. I let them dry well and then stamped the hearts on them with Versafine and fussy-cut them.

Afterwards I made light spots with water and darker spots by spraying paint on the hearts with a brush. On the again dried hearts I set white and black accents with acrylic pencils. I bent the hearts a little bit up at the edges and fixed them with spacer pads of different thicknesses.

For my background I have combined the stamps from several sets of Visible Image stamps. I always call this kind of stamps “grubby maker”. Many stampers use them for mixed media techniques and often they are used in dark colours. But I wanted to use them in the right happy colours to set a perfect scene for my hearts and let them feel good. The lines at the bottom of the square are again painted with an acrylic pencil.

The whole picture is quite very big: 21×21 cm, if you want to make it yourself.

Supplies