Stewart Gill acrylic backgrounds

I've been painting tonight with Stewart Gill Byzantia paints, which I've had for just a little while and love. They are super saturated, very light reflective and really fun to paint with.

This is a recycled toilet paper wrapper--a very crinkly paper wrapper, glued to heavy cardstock with soft glossy gel medium. After it dried, I painted it with the Byzantia, using a number of colors.

I'll be working a booth on artist trading cards tomorrow, so I'll take these along to play with, along with a bunch of other goodies.

More Paint Scraping

Here's another six backgrounds with the paint scraping technique I describe in the post below. The fourth one was a "smoosh" after the scrape with the one above it.

More Background Noise: Paint Scraping

Big thanks to Trish (see previous post), as this technique is very messy and one of my perennial favorites.

Squirt paints (I used a variety of acrylics) directly on paper (here, a mix of cold-press watercolor paper, canvas paper and cardstock), and scrape on and around with an old credit card. In some cases, I did a second scraping or even smooshing of the same colors with a fresh piece of paper.

Gluey Gooey Fun

I think February is just the month of backgrounds, period. I've been inking and dying a lot of paper and canvas, and my hands are all stained--always a sign of fun had! I've got quite a stash going for projects.

Tonight I'll post some of the paper backgrounds. These are glue resist backgrounds done on cardstock, and they are for another Trish Bee "Background Noise" challenge. See Trish's challenge here http://trishbee.co.uk/?p=34
And here are a few of the backgrounds. The basic idea is to smoosh (technical term) regular white PVA glue on cardstock--either randomly or in patterns, and let it dry. The glue acts like a resist when sponged with colors.

These will get added to my background noise journal.

ATC with the Nebula Grunge background

For a swap on CC Swaps, made with the Nebula Grunge background.

More Nebula Grunge experiments

My pal Fiona has experimented and done her own take on this technique. Check out her blog at http://fionascreations.blogspot.com/ to see what she did. I love that she tried it with different sprays and on glossy cardstock as well!

Nebula Grunge!

Yesterday I posted about a happy accident while trying to make something for a journal cover. Today I decide to experiment and see what I could come up with intentionally. Here are some finished backgrounds. In subsequent posts, I will explain how and what I did.

The basic technique and order is: paint chipboard with white acrylic and let dry. Spray with mists/colors of your choice. While these are still wet (immediately), lightly overspray with a darker colored spray. Dry with a heat gun ( I use a Marvy), moving the gun quickly and with short strokes over the surface until dry.

My theory is that by using acrylic paint (instead of the gesso I would--and do--normally grab when working with Color Mists), the paint "resists" the sprays and beads up when dryed--thus creating this distressed and starry look. The colors peek out from behind the darker color. In real life, these have a subtle sheen where pearlescent colors were used, and you can see the brush strokes in the paint (which adds to the grungy appeal).

My family kept saying these pieces look like galaxies and nebulas, and I kept loving how grungy they were, so folks, I offer you "Nebula Grunge," which I think is my own discovery. I've had A LOT of fun with this.

From the top down:

-Bright Colormists on chipboard box.
-Bright Color Mist Sprays with Tungsten Carbide (black) overspray;
-Halloween Color Mists with Emerald Green overspray
-Starburst Stains with Cobalt Sky overspray;

And one not to do: the bottom one is Adirondack Color mists in Butterscotch, Terra Cotta and Cranberry, oversprayed with Espresso. I tried a few other colors and these sprays just do not work with this technique. (I love these sprays for fabric (silk scarves) but I rarely use them for paper projects.)

More on Nebula Grunge

To give you an idea of how bright these are before I do the overspray, here are:

-Color Mists in bright colors (Lemon Yellow, Margarita Magenta, Slimescent Green, Cobal Sky and Tahoe Turqouise. The first picture shows the true brights, the second is the dried finished background. Overspraying these with Tungsten Carbide (black) gives the whole "night sky appearance" as the colors peek through. This was on one layer of acrylic paint.

-Starburst Stains in California Poppy Orange, Beauganvillea Fuschia and Delphinium Turquoise. Oversprayed with Color Mist in Cobalt Sky. This was also on layer of acrylic as well.

I experimented with lighter overspray colors as I went along, but I really like the darker look.

Nebula Grunge: how I started

Re: the Nebula Grunge Technique: here's where I started: white acrylic paint on chipboard. For the piece in the left, I painted just one coat, while I did two coats on the right-hand piece. Painted one coat on the box, which is also chipboard.

More in the next post...

Complementary Colors ATC Swap

These are going out to Annie in the U.K. I love comp colors, especially tertiary colors. Here I used red orange and blue green in oil pastels, a recent present.

Oil pastels are awesome. They go on so smooth and dense, and you can scrape them off to be as grungy as you want--my favorite part. The colors are highly saturated too.

The theme developed as I went: "time & tide."

Cheers Annie.

Shining Stones Backgrounds

The first "noise" challenge was Julia Andrus's "Shining Stones" background a la Trish Bee. It involves rainbow dye ink pads, glossy paper, mica pigments (I used Moon Glow w/ gum arabic for the binder), water, a heat gun and paper towels. For a how-to, please visit Trish's blog at
http://trishbee.co.uk/?p=309.

With the exception of the creole spice, which is a Kaleidocolor pad, I used Adirondack Big & Juicy rainbow dye ink pads. In order: Beach Comber with Moon Glow Fool's Gold; Waterfall with Pay Dirt Gold; Creole Spice with Fool's Gold; Hydrangea with Fool's Gold; and Tutti Frutti with Pay Dirt Gold.

This is an easy technique and the scans don't show the lovely gold shimmer.

Inky Layers tiled card

Here's one of the ways I used some of these backgrounds.

This is a card for an intern who's finishing up her last week at work. The front of the card says "a question for nora to soberly consider" and the inside is a stamp that says "what if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?"

Finished "Inky Layers"

I cut these pieces to A4 size and then added Fluid Chalk inks. The first picture shows what they looked like with warm red and dark peony added.

The final step calls for rubbing on a layer of iridescent ink. I used what I had: Daler-Rowney pearlescent medium in copper, but I thought it evened everything out too much, so I swiped on some additional inks, including some azurite. Here is a piece that I've finished. I rather like how layered these look.

Have to finish these up and then I'll mail them out for the background swap. Next I'll see what I can do with these backgrounds in terms of making ATCs.

Glaze

For step two of this background technique, I washed the backgrounds with an orange-yellow glaze--paint and gel medium mixed together.

This technique is called Inky Layers and it comes from Bernie Berlin's book, "Artist Trading Card Workshop," published by Somerset Studios. This book is full of inspiring techniques and we plan to start exploring them at the Yolo-area ATC group. I'll be teaching a workshop on Sept. 15 and this is one of the techniques I want to try out. Several more steps to come....

I'm also using these for a background swap on CC Swaps.

Next step, gesso

After gluing a crumpled magazine page to a sheet of cardstock with diluted PVA glue (see earlier post), step 2 was slapping on some gesso with a somewhat dry brush. Very haphazard, no plan but to leave some random areas exposed. Next step: acrylic paint & maybe some Moon Glow powders. I never know exactly what I'll use until I'm in the middle of it. Thanks to the ever-creative Trish Bayley for this idea. I'm looking forward to getting out the paints!

Magazine "scrunchie" background

Leave it to Trish B. to come up with something called "scrunchie." :) This was both a challenge on the Art Venture group and now an ATC swap on CC Swaps. Here's my start. Next come some gesso & acrylics--will post additional steps later.