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":
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!
