Texturing Your Art

On my blog today, I thought I would share a few of my texturing tools and tricks.  This is not a step by step but simply showing you a few things you can do, or use to create some wonderful effects in your paintings.

I use a variety of mediums layered on with a palette knife, each one holds paint differently and adds to the contrast when painting.  Gel mediums for example are smooth and slick when paint is applied, sometimes giving a translucent effect to the paint.  My go to place for gel mediums, texture pastes, course lava gel, gesso is Nova Color  Their prices are excellent and I feel they hold up as well as other Brand names do.  Golden and Matisse are my preference in paint though I do use a few colours from Nova as well. Jerry's Artarama is where I buy my paints, varnish, brushes and well most everything else.

So using this redo piece as my example, lets have a look at some of the things I did. (Be sure to click on the photos to see the details)

One of my fav texturing elements is the simplest, cheese cloth. I buy mine at my grocery store, it's everywhere!  I use it under the gesso and paint here and as a finishing element (in other pieces) I pull and fray it extensively before attaching it with gel or with gesso as I did here as a base texture.  You will notice the wonderful stencil I used by the talented Mary Beth Shaw.  I applied it using Wood Icing my other go to item, both purchased through Mary Beth @StencilGirl

Now here's a simple trick, the wood grainy texture through out this piece was created by using a firm foam brayer.

I use both the hard rubber brayer and this one. Now I know many use the inexpensive foam rollers but I found that for my work they, #1 soaked up one load of my expensive paint and #2 just couldn't handle the multi textured levels of my work, in other words they would get hung up and skid across sections instead of laying down track like you see here.  Just saying, sometimes the right tool is worth the investment.

You could use this to put your layer of gesso on or as in my case, I was doing an under painting in Bronze so I rolled it on achieving the wood grain effect you see here.

In this photo you will see that I used a thin layer of crackle medium by Jo Sonja. This is a one step crackle that dries clear and frequently gets used in my pieces, in this case I applied the crackle over my textured base, let it dry overnight then gessoed the piece.  Love the wonderful aged look it adds.

This is just a sampling of what can be done to create texture, remember this is a redo painting so it has layers of texture paste and wood icing as it's base, I only shared the top layering effects.

From here I am playing with collaging some embellishment items to create a stronger focal point, will let you know how that goes!