Playing with Paint

Good Evening Everyone,

I hope you all had a lovely weekend and those of you who have been poorly are on the mend. It's been a lovely day here, sunny but still chilly, but we're having more daylight and that's a blessing.

I spent some time at the weekend playing with these tester pots of matt emulsion trying out a few different backgrounds as instructed by Sheena Douglass on her Paint Fusion DVD and this is the results:

The base is some off-cuts of mount board - a freebie I was lucky enough to be given from a friendly art shop owner. Before starting a blob or two of the dark colour, the blue, was mixed with blobs of the cream to tone the colour down. This is the wet on wet method, i.e. a base coat of the cream is followed with a coat of blue/cream mix. The easiest and simplest of bases to make and quite nice too.

This is the water spatters effect. This is done by painting one colour, in this case cream, then when it's dry paint over with the contrasting colour, blue here, and before it's dry spritzing with water, dabbing this of quickly to give a blotchy effect.

This is the resist sample. This was done by smearing Vaseline over the base coat. Once that was done the blue mix was painted over the top and then it was dried with the heat gun. When the paint was dry it was rubbed with a paper towel to rub off the layer of paint over the Vaseline. It rubbed away to reveal the undercoat and looked like this. Maybe next time I should  put a thicker layer of Vaseline on to get a better effect.

And lastly the crackle effect. For this effect you have to paint a dark colour as the base coat and dry with the heat gun. Next you paint a layer of PVC glue all over the card and dry it of with the heat gun. Finally paint a layer of the light coloured (here it's cream) paint and again dry with the heat gun. It should crackle as the PVC heats up! A dismal failure I'm sorry to say.  It didn't crackle much and blistered a lot.

I can see I need to put in a bit more practice with these techniques, particularly the last.  But it was fun playing with the paints and plan to keep trying. So much so that I've decided that I'm going to give the challenges a miss for a while, except the weekly Christmas card, of course, because I want to focus on trying new techniques and working on some personal projects. I'm giving myself permission to work on anything I fancy : )

Hope you are all having a great evening and see you again soon.