Today has been our weekly Art Group meeting and we have been treated to a demonstration of mixed media painting using tissue and texture mediums by the wonderfully enthusiastic Jan Osbond. Jan works in both watercolour and oils (separately) over texture mediums and more often than not uses her fingers to paint with instead of traditional brushes.
At the moment Jan is doing a lot of work in black and white so she worked in monochrome for the purposes of the demonstration this morning. I have done quite a lot of work myself with texture mediums and tissue along with many other materials to provide texture but it was interesting and inspiring to see Jan's work. Most of all she opened my mind up to the thought of working with watercolour pigment straight from the tube, straight onto the paper, applied with the finger. She then manipulated the paint with water, stroked on with her fingers to pull out the paint and create edges or soft areas. The paintings you can see above (sorry they're a bit blurry) were done in this way. The texture mediums were mostly used in the lower part of the painting and included tissue, (which was stuck down as one piece on pva and then manipulated to suggest rocks, black flint medium, sand texture medium and glass beads texture medium. Ideally you need to think about what effect you are hoping to create (eg foreground vegetation, seaweed, rocks etc) when you initially put on the textures.
~The other technique which intrigued me involved applying inks to wetted paper, quite randomly apart from colour combinations, and then putting clingfilm (saran wrap) over the surface. Jan then pushed the clingfilm around on top of the paint until she was happy with it and left it to dry under a weight. Ideally you would leave this to dry overnight. The next step would be to peel off the clingfilm, re-wet the paper, reapply inks, cover again with clingfilm and dry again under weight (heavy book would do). You can repeat these steps several times until you get the result you're pleased with. Jan uses this method to achieve leaf shapes and suggest foliage. You also get a shiny surface with this method. I will certainly be having a go at this technique and will blog my results as soon as I've done it. Watch this space!!! lol
~The post today brought me not only the latest issue of Stitch magazine but also 4 ATCs from Lauren as part of a 4 Elements swap at the MixedMediaATCs_UK Yahoo group.
Clockwise from top left the cards interpret Water, Earth, Wind and Fire. I think Lauren has worked in pastel pencil to make these lovely delicate ATCs. Thanks Lauren :)
The afternoon has seen me fight my way through a pile of ironing so my to do list is not getting any shorter! My house and studio are both/all in total chaos so the weekend is hopefully going to see me restoring a little order as I can't function anymore with all this "stuff" (not forgetting the dust bunnies!).
5 comments:
Sounds like you had a wonderful time playing with paint today.
Good luck with the dust bunnies!
The class sounds great - I just love playing with paints to see what they'll do. Not so good at the planning beforehand bit though! I'll have to try the inks and clingfilm tip.
xx
What a fascinating technique with the inks and clingfilm. I'm itching to try it myself so hope you blog with details soon! I'd have loved to have been at that talk with you.
Hi Julie
What a brilliant opportunity to see a demo by somene with such a fresh and exciting approach to her work.
If you like this way of working I can recommend a great book that I've used quite a bit, it's 'Creative composition and design' Pat Dews, I got it at a car boot and have been thrilled with this £2.0 purchase.
what an interesting meeting, I have tried some of the things and was told about cling film but I didn't put a weight on it so will now try that, thanks, what lovely post,
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