Textural Bliss

From the class she took with Michael de Meng, my friend Jane taught me how to make some cool textures and cover them with washes of acrylic paint. I've been having a lot of fun with this texture/wash concept recently.

I tried a couple of 2-D experiments first:


The object on the left is a piece of chipboard that I punched with a bind-it-all. I layered tub and tile caulk on top, added gesso, and then added a few washes to it. The ribbon on the bottom of that image is a close-up of the texture.

The object on the right is a strip of matte board. A couple of years ago I bought a jar of "jumbo snow-tex" on clearance at Joann, of course having no clue what I would use it for. It's texture is more granular than caulk (see close-up at the top of the image) and it creates lots of crevices for the acrylic washes to pool.

Both of these pieces gave me a "did I really do that??" feeling. They look almost organic. Unlike most of my art, which generally sits in a closed drawer, I love staring at these pieces.

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I also decided to use these textural experiments to move into the realm of 3-D. I have a large collection of little wooden boxes that I've been developing for years. 90% of them are completely unfinished, and the 10% I have worked on I've been pretty unhappy with. Whenever I pull out a box and start painting, I always feel that it looks unfinished when it's done.

Using the texture/wash combination, though, I'm pretty pleased with the result. I don't think these pieces are "done", but they make me feel inspired to finish their transformation.

I added caulk and a wash of "serial killer red" paint to a cylindrical container that I've had forever. Not sure if you can tell from this photo, but I imprinted a bottle cap into the caulk of the lid to give it a different pattern.

The second box I worked on was a hexagon covered with caulk. I used a credit card to apply the caulk and found that if I laid it flat on the surface, it left a funky pattern (close-up on right). I painted it with a turquois wash. Not sure what the finished piece will be this time, but I think the pattern turned out pretty cool!

Since I was so pleased with my texture/wash experiments, I prepped a few more pieces that haven't been painted yet:

The circular container has my key-shaped paper cast in it from the Green Pepper Press Street Team's Crusade #20. I surrounded it with caulk in an attempt to make it look "embedded" into the box lid. I'm a little nervous about applying a wash to that one - even though I covered the lid uniformly with two coats of gesso, I'm afraid the acrylic washes will look different on the caulk vs the paper cast.

The square box on the right is one that I'm preparing for Jane. When I brought the painted pieces (above) to show her, she had so many ideas for each one that I thought it would be cool for her to have one to work in as well. The biggest challenge is deciding on the color to paint it!

So those are some of the things I've been working on lately. What have you been up to?