Remember that experiment with insolation foam I said I was going to try, well here is my first whack at texturing with the stuff. I've learned a number of things with this first attempt.
1. Towards the end I realized I could control the flow of the foam better keeping the textured bubbles smaller, good to know for future efforts.
2. That spreading the foam out with a plastic palette knife makes for a great effect and I'd do a lot more of that next time. Again doesn't help me with this first canvas...darn it!
3. It would help if I had a better idea of what I wanted to achieve as far as design layout goes. This I don't know if I'll ever pull off because most times I only have a vague idea at best of what I hope to accomplish. For me it's more experimental in approach, trying out some ideas and see where the texture and paints take me.
4. Be prepared to use up the whole can of foam on 3 or 4 canvases at one time as this stuff is impossible to clean up enough for reuse. It's sticky as all get out until hardened and once it's hardened there is little you can do to get the spray nosile cleared out!
I expect to be adding to this
'learning list' once I begin painting this deeply textured canvas, again I'll keep you posted :-) I wish I could say that the idea for using the foam was my own, but I got the idea from a wonderful abstract artist I came across recently,
Jan Sitts, love her work, original and vibrant! That's something I've learned about myself, I'm hesitant to try applying new techniques to a blank canvas for fear of totally ruining the valued canvas! When it comes to trying out peoples ideas I have no problem, but working with some medium that I come up with, then I get concerned that what I'm using will either wreck the canvas or not work with the paints and be a complete waste. See my rationalization is, I'll work with it until I get it to someplace I want to go, as opposed to doing something that you just can't fix because the canvas itself is ruined. Go figure, it must be the very practical influence of being raised by two very practical people, who by the way would be appalled at the waste of a can of good insolation foam :-)
