New Products

I was recently introduced to a few new products that I would love to share with you.

The biggest struggle for me to figure out my style of painting has been trying to figure out what products will give me texture, but also what products will give me the flow of paint that I want as well.

Being trained as a Scenic Artist and working with Scenic paint and house paint for so many years on sets, I knew how to anticipate effects and textures. I couldn’t figure out the same thing with fine art acrylics. I figured you buy the best paint (Golden, in my opinion) and the paint does the rest for you. Well, not so. And with so many different types of paints on the market, how do you even start to choose? Everything is so expensive, you don’t want to buy everything just to find out a lot of them don’t work for what you want to do.

I wanted paint that was high in pigment, but easily blendable, moveable, essentially an acrylic type of watercolour in a sense.

Taking this course by Maria Pace Wynters through Olga Furman Art has been exactly what I needed. I love Maria’s style of painting. It really resonates with me. I have a few of her pieces, including an original. A lot of my style is heavily influenced on the way she paints, but I definitely have my own style.

On this piece, I started with a primed birch panel by Gotrick (you can easily find them at any art store. Best prices at Delta Art in Edmonton). I was introduced to Golden’s Fine Pumice Gel. It does have some very slight colouration to it, but when you use a thin coat, it’s negligible. It gives a very slight tooth to your surface. If you would want to use some drawing mediums, this would be the product you’d want to use on a surface that‘s too slick. Sometimes the pre-primed panels are a bit too slick, so Maria suggested this product to use. I have to agree with her. It’s excellent.

The base colours that I started with for the painting with Suzuki was Holbein Acrylic Ink. It hadn’t occurred to me to use inks or really thinned paints for acrylic paintings. For some reason, I was fixed that it had to be heavy body acrylics or nothing. The great thing with this product, is that you don’t have to use much for a huge impact, you can apply it, spritz with water to soften it. I found that when it’s drying, if you have a sprayer that sprays very unevenly, then you actually get some lovely textures on the paint. This really reminded me of getting what’s called a ‘negative spatter’ effect in Scenic Art. You’d apply your paint in a glaze, wait until it’s just dry, and then spatter with slightly heavier water droplets. Wait that perfect amount of time, and then wipe away. What ended up happening is that you could wipe away those droplets entirely, leaving some fabulous distressed paint effects.

So the water can be applied when the ink is wet to initially soften. I waited not very long, but the ink started to dry slightly, then I sprayed chunky, and you can see the water droplets here. This made me so happy. Applying additional ink on top, because it’s so transparent gave just a beautiful effect and intensity of colour.

The other product that I’ve now been introduced to is Liquitex Acrylic Ink. These inks are really becoming versatile products. As the technology to develop these products expands, so do the products. It’s quite fascinating. Also, kind of hard to keep up with all the changes. To be able to have access to highly pigmented paints with a lot of transparency seems to be quite new to me.

I bought a couple of colours for this project. One was this Turquoise Deep, and I also bought a Transparent Burnt Sienna. They played really well with the Holbein inks.

Last year, I bought some stencils online because I thought that it would be really neat to add some texture to my paintings. I’ve finally found my way with all of this. I mixed some Golden Heavy Body Acrylic paint with their Hard Molding Paste. You could use gel medium, or anything like that that gives bulk to your paint.

I mixed it thoroughly, and then with a silicone shaper brush, I smeared the paint over the stencil. I was able to control it, and lift it in areas where I wanted the texture to dissipate. I chose to add a teal coloured heavy body paint to it, but if you’re working with inks, etc it would be interesting to add some white glue to it as glue acts as a resist to paint. It could make for some really neat effects.

I‘m so excited to explore this further. I feel that this has opened up many possibilities for me to do paintings that I’ve wanted to do, but was unsure as to how they would/could be created.

I hope that you have found this informative. All the best on your journey.

Thanks for reading

If you liked this post, you can choose to send me a tip/donation through my ko.fi account.

Buy me a coffee!