June's First Friday Creative Social
Friday, June 14, 2013 at 2:47PM For our First Friday make & take project this month, we focused on texture...
Here are the steps for our make & take:
- Everyone started with a board I prepped ahead of time with Fiber Paste. I spread the Fiber Paste out with a large palette knife (as if icing a cake) then took a foam stamp and stamped several areas of the paste to create texture valleys. I then flattened out some of the peaks, where the paste got thick from stamping, using the same palette knife. This was allowed to dry overnight.
- Your first step on the Fiber Paste board was to create washes and stains with Fluid Acrylics. Fiber Paste looks like handmade paper when it is dry, and it is also absorbent, so it makes a great surface for watermedia! We used large flat brushes to dampen the surface with water... then chose a few Fluid colors and thinned them with varying percentages of water and dragged them into our dampened Fiber Paste using a brush. It's fun to watch how the colors flow into the texture valleys from the stamp, as well as the fibrous texture of the paste. After we applied these colors, we set our boards aside to dry.
- Our next step was to add more texture on top of our Fiber Paste layer by using a gel. Gels are paint without color, they come in varying viscosities...for our project we used High Solid Gel (Gloss). It is the thickest of the gels and is one of my favories products for creating textures. High Solid Gel (Gloss) dries clear, so you can use it by itself as a clear layer, or you can mix it with acrylic color to create a tinted layer. For our project, we mixed color with our High Solid Gel (Gloss). Above you can see that I chose a green - Sap Green Hue - to tint my gel. The less color you mix with your gel, the lighter and more transparent the mixture will be, the more color you use, the darker and more opaque the gel will get. Because Sap Green Hue is a dark pigment, I used a percentage of about 20% color to 80% gel so that my gel layer would stay transparent. Keeping your gel texture transparent will allow you to see through to the beautiful stains and washes you made on your Fiber Paste! For application tools, we used some of Princeton's Catalyst blades and wedges to squeegee the gel into our texture valleys, as well as carve into them using the fun patterned edges of the Catalyst tools. To achieve the texture on my board, I used blade no 3.
Links:
Read more about Golden's pastes here
Read more about Golden's gels here
I look forward to next month's First Friday and seeing what everyone creates for our next make & take project: ACRYLIC SKINS
