Playing with Paint

In recent weeks, I have been watching Tracy Marie , a canadian therapist who liked to scrapbook, and getting inspired to start working with mixed media and play around with the motion on composition.

As I am comfortable with working in black and white or with very monochromatic colour schemes, I thought that by playing around with mixed media, I would be able to experiment more with colours, design principles and just see what works and what doesn't. I am really excited to start working with colours as it has been a long time since I painted and I was , in a way, getting quite bored with my current way of working.

This video is one of Tracy Marie's art journal process video which inspired me to try and experiment more with colour. What I really liked about this video was how she explained her way of working which allowed me to see in detail which techniques I would like to experiment with in my own work.This has also taught me that layering is key in working mixed media and in producing interesting work. It has also shown me how text and media can be combined in such a way where they blend together and look equal - no particular element stands out.

In the beginning, I stared with a thin layer of watered down acrylic paint just roughly spread out across the page. I then went it and started the add more acrylic paint and tried to blend it out. I chose to use two types of paper ( normal 120gsm cartridge paper and 190gsm acid free watercolour paper ) as I wanted to see how the texture of the paper affected the way in which my paint looks on the paper. After a few layers of just creating different marks with my brush, I felt that my pages were looking awfully similar therefore I started to introduce palette knives which created a lot of very interesting marks.

However, even with adding palette knives into the layout, I still felt that there weren't enough difference in the marks that I am putting down on to my layout and so therefore, I started to use bubble wrap to create with dots on the paper with.

At this point, I was started to get frustrated with mow translucent my white paint was and therefore, tried to layer on more and more with my palette knife. This was a bad idea, not only that the white paint was translucent, it started to dull down other colours and my layout started to look more and more muddy so therefore I stopped using the white paint that I have and scurried my stash for another one. This is how they turned out :

As you can see, I have chosen to work with only 3 colours ( red, white and yellow ) in order to not overwhelm myself. The first outcome was done on watercolour paper and even though it was easier to work on as it didn't curl up as much as the cartridge paper, I was very fond of how the paint clung onto the texture of the paper. I wasn't fond of the texture as I felt that I was just too much and too busy for a background.

I really love the way these two turned out as they had just the right amount of each element and even though they were quite busy, they still contain less busy parts in which I can layer and add photographs or text on top of.

As this experiment was done in order to see whether or not this technique could be used in my final editorial, I decided to see how they would look like black & white or at least monochromatic as a drawing I did for my editorial is a tonal drawing and therefore ( for now ) I would like to create a black and white editorial spread.

Even though having the experiments in black and white, I don't really like how the lack of colour seems to have made increased the contrast of the layout and therefore if I were to use these in my editorial, I would have to either place vellum on them, or decrease their opacity greatly just to sort of hint at them.