*whew*

Halloween's over for another year, the witches are mostly out on the land,S harvesting strange herbs.  That means fewer broomsticks in the skies

 Jumping over the moon?

Oh yes, pigs can fly or at least the ones bred in the UK

Of course this was all started by having Grumbacher as our sponsor this month, and Naughty Nan forwarding 3 tubes of water-soluble oil paints amongst other goodies!  When they say say wash up in soapy water, they mean SOAPY water - they're still oil-based after all.

I have never used oil paints. In my librarian days  I’d been around fine art books aplenty, and in the “olden days” oil paint was pretty much the only thing around for artists to use.  As a “fibre artist” I’m also familiar with plant dyes.  And they're all "demanding" and smelly, or poisonous, to work with.  So when I discovered mixed media, I embraced acrylics paint with joy.  Now I’ve been given oil paints, albeit water-soluble, to try out.  In one of those cheapo shops I found another brand, so I grabbed a box of them, and they’re just like cheapo acrylic paint tubes – even I can tell the difference!  The cheapos have already separated, with a layer of binders/whatever at the top before you finally get some pigmented stuff out.  Take a swipe with both brands on the palette knife, and the cheapo goes on erratically, runs out sooner, and when you do some sgraffito, the cheapos don’t show it where the colour density is thin.  Try blending 2 similar colours from each brand, the cheapos go mud, Grumbacher creates a new colour.  I played with just how one can move the good stuff round, blend it into still-damp gesso (oops, thought it was dry!) .  Totally new product, and I’m enjoying the  play-experiment time.  Meantime I’m also enjoying the different consistency from acrylic paint.  Adding water is also fun with the Grumbacher, hopeless with the cheapo stuff.  So here are the tombstones, using only Grumbacher:

Then I dry-brushed some iridescent pearl acrylic over the bat body.  Tsk tsk - acrylic over oils which is the right way with house paints, but a no-no here.

Oh No!  One of the flying Piggies must have come afoul of some witch, hungry for bacon and leg roast!

In one small snap you can see almost all the ways I physically "texturised" the canvas.

A stencil with matt gel medium straight onto the canvas before any colour was used.  Various acrylic paints drizzled, sprayed, water-spritzed.  Die-cut trees given texture by applying Grumbacher's water-soluble oil paint, as are the mdf tombstones.  The witches broomsticks are blackboy peach prunings, with ends splintered.  Elsewhere stamps inked with Stazon went on.

I managed to re-capture my Grumbacher palette knives from the frogs long enough to enjoy the large sweeps with the big one to get the gel medium through the small gaps of the stencil, and playing with the oilpaint textures with another.  But as soon as my back was turned... I tracked the painty smears through the house, outside, but lost them somewhere under the borage plants.

"Bibliography":

Splatter Proof die - Seth Apter-The Altered Page / Spellbinders

Treeline die - Sizzix

Tombstones (mdf) - retrocafeart

Skull flourish corner - Creative Embellishments

flying pigs - Things To Alter

Wicked Witch feet under house - viva las vegas stamps (heat embossed)

Ink splatter - Cherry Pie Arts

Spinners set: Numbers spin because it looked like star constellations and their "gps" co-ordinates), Faded fragments set: Star, Screen print - Seth Apter-The Altered Page or Impression Obsession

Sept 2016 boho stencil - Stencil Girl Club

And of course, trawl the Grumbacher site, explore the whole range, the inspiration and the tutorials

Meantime Evil Froggy is being run ragged even though 31DoH is over - keep your off-beat, dark, weird makes coming here - remember, no cute wide-eyed girlies being sweet - the world is swamped with opportunities elsewhere for that!