Creative Sunday

Sunday again and time for another exercise from Dale Ann Potter's Positively Creative Art Journaling course. I recognize the technique we'll be using, although it is one I've only read about, never tried. Starts with spreading paint on pages again and instead of the foam brush I've been using, I decided to use this scrub brush - one I remember as favorite back when I was doing sun prints. I put a little acrylic paint on a palette, wet the brush and swished it around in the paint to dilute it a bit and painted away. Of course, that means painting another square on the sampler to use up extra paint (which I did after the next step, but this was a prettier picture to lead off with).

Then quick, while the paint is still wet, cover it with plastic wrap and moosh things around. It wasn't mooshing much. One thing I've noticed in doing these exercises is how quickly the paint dries on the page. Although I was quite quick with the wrap, I'm thinking I didn't put enough paint down, or get it on both sides of the spread fast enough to prevent areas from drying before I was ready. By the way, I have slipped oversized pieces of scrap paper under either page to protect the pages underneath, a trick I picked up from watching a Joggles video tutorial. To my chagrin, I'd noticed a blob of green paint  near the top of my first spread after finishing the second spread and I knew exactly how it had happened.

After sitting for a few minutes, the wrap comes off, lifting paint with it which you can transfer onto something else, in this case, a piece of copy paper. Not surprisingly, there wasn't much paint to transfer. Hardly anything came off on the paper.

And there wasn't much texture created on the page spread. Here is one section that did what it was supposed to. But you can also see that the paint did not cover up the writing underneath it.

So the directions said if this happened, just apply another color of paint and do the plastic wrap technique again. I put a little white acrylic paint on the same spot on the palette as the green had been, wet the brush just a little (but not enough to remove any green paint still lurking), and swirled it around on the palette. Just enough green mixed with the white to tint it and I generously applied this layer over the page. I used the same piece of plastic wrap over the spread and immediately could feel the paint was moving as intended, could see through the plastic what was happening. When I pulled off the plastic, I had a nicely textured page although there were still some areas where the underlying text showed (sorry - did not take a pic of that stage).

I'm not showing you the finished spread as it is mostly just text (including favorite song lyrics), hard to read and somewhat personal - as a whole not particularly creative in look. However, I did add some embellishment around the edge with Pigma Pen and Gelly Roll pen, inspired by Zentangle designs in my reference notebook. I'm liking that Gelly Roll pen way too much.

On the surface, these exercises don't seem like much, small in scale and not great works of art. However, I have noticed a shift in my attitude about using paints. I'm getting over the feeling that to get out the paints means a big chunk of time, lots of prep and lots of clean-up. Ok, I suppose you all knew that, but up until now, that is how I've been approaching any exploration of surface design, making it into a BIG DEAL. Now I see how one really can get out a small dab of paint and a brush, do a little something, be it stamp a few images or lay down some color, do a little rinsing and be on to something else.