Playing with Texture

I've had these canvases laying around for months, half finished, not quite knowing what to do to finish them... you know the story. Well, about a little over a week ago, I happened upon my local Dick Blick store and there was a Golden Paint working artist/representative there demonstrating how to use their products. I was so excited I couldn't sit down. She had piles and piles of boards showing examples of paints, gel mediums, molding pastes, transfers, mediums, oh my. All the cool things you can do with them. It was almost information overload. I asked her about the glass bead gel and she hands me the jar and says, "here, you can keep this one. Play with it." WOOOT! But then everyone got a goody bag to take home and oh my goodness, what generosity. I got another little tub of glass bead gel, a little tub of blue paint, a fluid acrylic, and a tub of Iridescent Stainless Steel paint. And a brochure/folder with ALL the paint sample colors painted on by someone's actual hand. So you know the color you see is the color you get.


Well, that inspired me to finish up some of these canvas panels I had laying around. The LEAF picture has an actual leaf embedded in the medium. Unfortunately at the time I didn't realize that heavy molding paste was opaque and you could hardly see the little bugger. So I painted over it. And layered and layered and layered different glossy paints with glossy mediums. The colors in real life are really pretty and show a lot of depth.

 

The ZELDA picture is one I'm afraid I overdid. An example of what happens when there are TOO many layers. The Z in the corner is a little lost and the image fades into the background too much. One of the reasons I didn't like it before was that it had too much black so I tried to tone it down a bit with some light paints and then some iridescent bronze. It has some wonderful texture as well but it's not my favorite. Maybe a glossy coating would help that image pop? hmmmmm.....


That's all for now. Stay tunes for... ZENTANGLES... coming up next!