August 12, 2010

Gesso Texturing

This week's Art Journal Challenge from, Art-It does a body good!, was about texturing with gesso. Have I mentioned that I find the smell of gesso somewhat comforting? Weird I know and I blame my mother, actually I blame her for all my art'ing adventures. I'm working in my Prompt Journal made special for prompts. Here is what I did; began with plain ol' white gesso, brushed on with a fairly stiff brush. It dried. Hum not so much texture.



I proceeded to mix a bit of color with the white gesso to give it a little tint and brushed each one in a diagonal fashion. These almost dried when...


I went on to cover over them with gesso tinted with orange and brown, well I just wasn't pleased with how this page was going. Just not feeling it, ya know? I think really it was how the day's studio frivolity affected me, which I will tell you about at another time. They were sorta heavy and not quite dry...

So I got some plastic wrap and laid it on top, smooched it around, then bunched up the wrap and rolled it around. Well that's interesting, but still not liking it.


I took a break and made a very pleasing ATC (I'll show & tell at another time) I broke out the clear gesso and after a quick clean up I finger painted it on. Got out my squeegee tool with notches and just wriggled it across the pages. Then went back to making ATCs


I suppose this page could be finished, yet not being happy I continued one. Adding some acrylic paints med-dark blue, then white using the credit card tech. I added some finger smeared white marks and dry brushed on some blue-gray kinda swirly.



and at last I found my page. I went on, applied some paper cut into cloud like shapes, white tissue paper to texture some of the clouds and a poem I wrote that this swirly wind looking page brought to mind.



Now that I have finished my page, I'm off to check out yours. See I can't really look at other peoples until after I have finished mine, otherwise I may become disheartened at my work. See you soon if not sooner.

8 comments:

spooky said...

Oooh, I love gesso swirls!

Scrapacat said...

Oh heavenly! I love your page, but especially love the story of developing the page. So many people stop because they don't like it on first, second, third, tenth glance, so the page is never "born". All the layers of textures here really work in the final view. It's AWESOME. Thanks so much for playing along with the challenge, and sharing it with your readers! ~ky

Bonnie in SC said...

How could you be disheartened with your work when it turned out so well? I like the smokey dream-like quality of the page. Very nice.

Monica said...

hi, just stumbled across your blog. great page. thanks so much for sharing the process, LOVE seeing the process.
look forward to seeing your atcs.

Taylor said...

I think this is absolutely gorgeous!! I love the way it turned out. Mine is still a work in progress, lol.

Kerri Love said...

I love how this turned out, the color is sooo pretty :) and the texture is great. Plus you gave me a few new technique ideas, so Thanks!

joyce rodli said...

I'm with Kerri....new ideas on playing.....I like that first pic that looks like pot-holes in the road.

An'Angelia Thompson said...

One of these days I really MUST play with gesso! You made it look like a lot of fun :o)

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