Play Time

Recently my cyber friend Suztats posted her technique for  painting postcards.  I was  fascinated with her methods and the wonderful results she achieved.  This is something I  have been wanting to try  ever since, and today I took the plunge.  Thank you Suz for inspiring me to take up my brushes again.

Firstly I could not find my painting mediums, but after hours of searching discovered them in a box in the garage I had not unpacked!    I wanted to use my acrylics with a watercolour medium and see what happened.

Well I cant say I am overly excited about the results so far.  I still  don't seem to have any  abstract bones in my body, and keep wanting to paint realistically, so there is lots of room for improvement.   This is the first time I have taken up a brush in about 3 or 4 years, so the mere fact that I "actually painted" something made me feel good anyway.

First of all I used aquadhere and texture paste to form flowers and swirly bits.  I also stuck down some masking tape.

Then Icoloured the background green/green mixed with red/green mixed with purple and alizarine for the flowers. When I pulled the masking tape off it pulled up some of the top of the paper so made designs where the paint grabbed.

I took to it with a chux wipe and blured edges. Then I took a fine brush and emphasised outlines and shapes with purple, then blurred again with the chux.  This time with a bit of  dampness in the cloth..

Then I blurred the purple and fiddled until my brain said no more.  Even then I could not resist coming back later and fiddling. So it is not now this purple but more muted.

Here are a few samples of the smaller cards cut from the whole piece. I could not get over the number of figures I could see.  Cut up, the cards came out better than expected. Some I think I will decorate and play with more.