I really love to exploit the qualities of acrylic paint in combination with watercolour.

You can see here how I’ve printed a couple of circles using white acrylic paint on a disk of compressed sponge. Once the paint was completely dry I’ve wet the paper with clean water and then dabbed two of the blues and the brown from the palette of  concentrated watercolours we provide in the art kit. Don’t you just love how the colour pools in the hollows of the printed circles?

Of course it works on any shape printed with acrylic paint – here I’ve used compressed sponge cut into a moth shape. I wanted to keep the background quite pale but I’ve added a little cross hatching with a fine liner pen to delineate the outline of the moth without actually drawing a continuous line around it. The large circle is a rubbing off a plastic stencil and I like how the pencil ‘noise’ around it complements the dark lines of the pen. I mixed blue and black watercolour together to paint the moon and then stamped the letters.

The small circles on the right hand page were made by rubbing with the side of a graphite pencil over a plastic stencil. Those on the left are acrylic sponge prints again but can you tell they were worked on a lose sheet of paper and then attached just at the edge of the page like a flap? The extension is closed in this image.

Here it’s open and you can see how it changes the size and proportion of the open spread. What’s fun is that it can be opened to show when the next page is revealed as well as the one it is attached to!

Because acrylic paints dry with an impervious surface additional layers of paint won’t lift the colour – so I like to add a wash of watercolour and am very generous with the water to enable it to flow across the page.

Hope you are enjoying Module 3 as much as I am!

Bye for now,
Linda