Mixed Media Monday – Least Favourite Colour

The challenge over at Mixed Media Monday is to use your least favourite colour. It was easy choosing a colour – PINK is certainly my least favourite colour! The challenge was to find items to use in this piece. As I am definitely not drawn to this colour, I have very little in my stash that is pink. For some reason, I also decided to add another least favourite colour in the form of orange.

Pink and Orange Tennis Ladies

Painted on cereal-box cardboard with gesso and pink and orange paints. Stamps are French Quarter, by See-D’s, stamped with Staz-on Graphite Black. Images from Lisa Vollrath’s Christmas countdown.

For more details on how I put this piece together, visit my website Mixed Media Art.

Happy creating!

Michelle

GPP – Crusade No. 25 Gesso

I’m back for this month’s GPP Street Team Crusade! This month is all about Gesso and it’s fabulous properties for creating resistance paint backgrounds. I’ve used Gesso a little before and had discovered some of its properties by accident. This is a great chance to delve a further into the sticky white “paint” with deliberation, rather than through sheer fluke!

Firstly I found a nice clean spread that already had some Gesso on one page, where I’d wiped off the brush from another project (I just HATE wasting that last bit of paint on brushes). I have a paint brush dedicated to Gesso, so I added some more with a criss-cross pattern [right hand side]. On the other page I stamped some swirls (from Buzz and Bloom) with Gesso brushed on. This was left to dry completely.

First Layer with Gesso

Next some purple and red acrylic paints were applied randomly across the two pages. I was a bit impatient here (and painting on the floor as my art table is such a mess!) so the colours are a bit too blotchy. I then squirted the pages with some water and used paper towel to swish some off. This worked better when I left the water to sit for a while – it created the whitish spaces on the RHS. I also found that the paints blended better over the Gesso background.

After paint and water spray was applied

The left-hand side didn’t work as well – that didn’t have any undercoat, so the paint tended to adhere to the page and the stamped swirls, rather that create a true resist. Next time I’ll paint with acrylics first, then add the Gesso images.  The RHS came up really well. Here is a close up:

Close-up pic of resisted area

You can still see the criss-crossed Gesso underneath. I have found that the underlying brush strokes in the Gesso often show through, so you need to keep that in mind.

Yet again Michelle Ward has created another fantastic artistic challenge – looking forward to many more into the New Year.

Hope all of your Christmas crafting projects are progressing well (that’s where I’m off to next!)

Michelle

MMM Believe

This weeks Mixed Media Monday challenge is to use the word “Believe”, which I thought would be simple, as I use the word quite often…but being challenged with the word alone, there were many, many options and it was hard to choose one.

Scrapbooking paper was adhered with double sided tape (don’t have to wait for it to dry!) and Gesso’d over (this takes the brightness out of the paper). I then stuck squares of text in a row and painted over them again with Gesso. Stamped various alphabet sets with Staz-on. I don’t think it’s finished but don’t know what else to add. I was thinking butterflies but that seemed too cute.

Your thoughts are most welcome; please leave a comment.

Michelle