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

I love, love, love texture, especially environmental/industrial textures like wood grain, stone, corroded metal and chipped paint...so I've decided to put together a book on how to simulate textures like the ones above using acrylic paint and mediums.  I'm still in the outlining stages with this, but am planning to have something self-published and ready for release by the end of the Summer!  I look forward to sharing these project ideas with all of you!

The Blue Grosbeak - Acrylic on Panel, 8x8 inches

To hear the Blue Grosbeak's song, please visit: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Blue_Grosbeak/sounds

Left to Right: Monoprint, Collgraph, Monoprint

We worked with Golden' OPEN Acrylics which dry slow and are great for printmaking applications because you have time to work your color on your "plate". 

With our monoprints, we used freezer paper as a printing plate, which I wrapped around a hardboard panel so that we would have a sturdy surface to work on.  For a printing plate, you could also use glass, gelli plates, hardboard panels, sheet protectors, carved linoleum, and more.  We used tape to hinge stonehenge paper to our freezer paper so that we could do multiple passes of our print and keep the paper lined up with the panel.  You can be more precise with how you create registration marks and tape off a margin, but for this exercise we kept things really simple!  After hinging our paper, we brush applied Open colors to our printing plate, being careful not to make this too thick (otherwise our print would come out "squishy") then we laid the paper down over our color and burnished the backside so that the paper would pick up the color.  We repeated this process two or three times to create fun color layers, cleaning off the plate between each pass.

For our collograph prints, we used some textured surfaces that I made ahead of time.  Instead of being flat, collographs are made over a surface that has been built up with a relief...you can make a relief from acrylic gels and pastes - try embedding textiles or fibers for an added effect (my sample image above had lace and string embedded between layers of Coarse Molding Paste and Soft Gel Matte)!  You will get the crispest image capture over a surface that is sealed with a slick material (like one of the basic gels); over an absorbent or pebbly surface, less color will transfer.  For these prints, we dampened our stonehenge first before burnishing it over our textured plate - this will help promote more flexibility from the paper so that it will bend and form to the texture underneath, and the water will help lift more color out of the crevices.

In addition to Stonehenge paper, I also like using Rives or another 100% cotton printmaking paper. 

Here are a couple images from our make & take table:

Our next First Friday event is happening on June 7, I hope to see you there!

I had so much fun making these boards!  Each surface combined two or more layers of acrylic color, gels, and/or pastes, and were enhanced with Fluid Acrylics to bring the peaks and valleys to life. 

Follow the link to hear its song: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Philadelphia_Vireo/sounds

It occured to me that I've never shared what drawing tools I'm using, I get in the habit of talking about paint so talking about drawing supplies sometimes escapes me.  For all of my drawings I've been working on Strathmore 300 series smooth bristol... I had been working with the vellum bristol, but due to it's slight texture, it was harder to erase my lines.  For graphite pencils, I'm usually pretty loyal to Derwent but I'll use other brands too.  Since I'm keeping my images fairly light, I use a 3H to block in everything, and an H and B (occasionally a 2B) to darken and enhance the values.  For erasers I like to have two types on hand - a kneadable eraser and a black factis.... I use the kneadable eraser to soften and blur edges, and the black factis to obliterate areas.

White Throated Sparrow - Acrylic on Panel, 8x8 inches

Part of the process is understanding grittiness and absorbency of acrylic surfaces and what your stains will "cling to" the best (my favorite surface for stains is Acrylic Ground for Pastels), then there is the issue of how much water to use to thin your color - which is something you can easily go overboard on.  Blending can be tricky as well, even with Open paints that dry slow... the type of brush you are using plays a huge role here because you need the right softness and stiffness, etc.  I'm really looking forward to sharing more information about these color applications in the workshop on Sunday May 5 so each of my students will be able to make better Stains, Glazes, and Blends!

ps: here is a link to the song of the White Throated Sparrow - http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/white-throated_sparrow/sounds