Welcome Back
Earlier this week I set The Virtual Crafting Challenge as ‘Make a Wish come true’. For my contribution to the challenge I’m going to take a leaf of faith, here’s what I’m going to do.
Adventures with Acrylic Paint
A couple of years ago I bought a set of Golden Fluid Acrylic paints and a bunch of mediums and took a class with Julie Pritchard. Both the materials and the class blew my mind, they were so good. Trouble is, after the end of the class, my artistic angst kicked in and although I’ve done a few things with them, I was stuck in the ‘I want to use them but they cost a lot to replace, ‘I’ll SAVE them for a special project’. DOOMED! Once I’d said that, no project was special enough. There my beautiful paint sat, revered in their Really Useful box and doomed to dry out in the bottles. Loved and very much wanted but too precious to use 😦
I needed a Plan B! I love my Ranger Acrylic Dabbers but they are a swine for clogging up on me, but the Golden’s are expensive so I needed to try something else. I tried Daler Rowney System 3 as it was more fluid, but PHEW did it smell of fumes {splutter, cough}! So although the consistancy was great, I didn’t like using it.
Last year for my birthday, thanks to my wonderful MIL and Ebay bargains, I was able to get trial sets of Daler Rowney Cryla and also Winsor and Newton’s new acrylics Galeria. I loved the Cryla but for what I want to do with them, the heavy body consistency was too thick.
The Winsor and Newton Galeria on the other hand are great, they flow beautifully and are affordable.
So my leap of faith was to increase my palette of Galeria colours, to include the colours I used most with my Ranger inks. This way I can try out my inking techniques with the paints and have a water-resistant finish, which is more suitable for decorating book covers. I also added the Daler Rowney Shimmering colours to the stash box. Shimmering colours are Daler Rowney interference colours, I’d have bought these AGES ago, if I’d realised they were more fluid than the Cryla.
To stop myself getting so precious about the paints, I have ‘gathered’ the paint together in one box, this way I’ll be more tempted to try different kinds of paint on lots of surfaces to discover the results. I’m going to group the mediums together in another box too, so instead of just using my favorites I try them all.
In the end I had to put the Cryla in a separate box, firstly their consistency is quite different to the Galleria and secondly, I’m feeble and couldn’t lift the box with them ALL in together! Putting too many tubes on top of each other also risked the whole lot crushing itself too.
One of the ‘joys’ of dyslexia is that I’m always loosing things, or can’t remember where I put things, my plan is that by putting stash together in related boxes like this, I will be less likely to lose things. It’s much harder to lose a big box of something than it is to forget where you put a tube of paint 🙂
LOVE Really Useful boxes, they are just the right sizes and they stack too! The 3 litre one, made for DVDs, is the perfect height for 75 ml Cryla tubes 🙂 The 9 litre Really Useful box was just the right height for the mediums too 🙂 They are really sturdy and stack too.
Remember how much fun it was in primary school, when there was a box of ‘stuff’ on the table and you could create with anything in the box?
That is what I’m going for, all the options in one place together, mix ’em up and see what happens.
So this month I’ll be turning mad professor and having a jolly good play with the paints and mediums and when I discover anything exciting along the way, you’ll be the first to know. I may be some time 😉 🙂 🙂 🙂
Links
If I’ve tempted you with these pictures and you want to know more about how I got on with the paints. Here are links to my reviews about the paint, that I published when I first got them.
How about you, will you be joining in with The Virtual Crafting Challenge this month? I’d love to hear about your adventures and what you’ll be doing with this month’s theme.
Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon
Billie 🙂
Can’t wait to see what you make!! I love acrylic paints, too, and have some that are 30 years old and still fine. I took a class with Claudine Hellmuth online, and she had some great ideas. Golden and Liquitex also have youtube channels that have some interesting videos.
Hi Deb
Oh thanks for the heads up about the You Tube channels and online classes. There is some really useful stuff on You Tube, where would we all be without the internet 🙂 I’ve been having a play, its been such fun. I cut a pile of matt board and have let my mad proffesor go nuts with everything just to see what comes of it. This seems to be a great way to learn. If you get something you like great, if not, hey you still learnt that those things didn’t go together. I’m collecting quite a pile of experimental recipie cards.
I guess the good thing about having no idea quite what a product does, or is ‘meant’ to go with means you aren’t limited. Just roll with the ‘What if’ 🙂
Happy creating
Billie 🙂
All those lovely lush colours 🙂 Like the look of the interference/shimmery paints. Can you add those to other acrylic colours to get a shimmery effect?
Spent ages on the Daler Rowney web site just drooling over all the gorgeousness 🙂
Have fun with your experimenting and let us see what you have done
Hugs
Lynn 🙂