Rhapsody in Red - GPP Street Team Crusade # 29

So for this month's GPP Street Team Crusade, Michelle encouraged us to get down and dirty with our paint brushes and play around with paint effects like dry brushing, mono-printing, and a little thing she likes to call "dirty brush".

Kind of sounds a little naughty, but it is all good clean dirty fun !

One thing that I like to do periodically is have a paint play session to create a ton of painted papers that I can use later as backgrounds, in my art journal or in collages. I sometimes choose one color to concentrate on at a time, if my stock of one color is low or if I find a new color scheme I want to play with. For this play time, I chose red.

I usually get out a pile of papers, a couple of cheap chip brushes, a make-up sponge, few kinds of paint in my chosen color (ie: craft acrylics, Golden Fluids, Lumiere metallics, inks, etc), a ton of my favorite stamps and stencils and a plastic table cloth on the floor so I can just throw the wet papers down to dry in between layers.

Then I play.

This is my Rhapsody in Red :

Here is some watercolor paper with Lumiere paint in gold dry brushed over top.

This piece shows my hand carved circle stamp in the background. Then I pooled Lumiere paint in gold and some Vermillion Red Golden Fluids mixed with water on the cheap sketch book paper and let it dry for a couple of hours. Gorgeous effect, I think !

This one has a variety of tools, like hand carved stamps (the points), masks and my own flourish stencil, used both as a stencil and as a mono-print. I also used Michelle's dirty brush technique - mixing red and black on a dry chip brush and stroking the surface here and there.

This page has my hand carved leaf stamp and then my bought letter stencil used as a mono-print - apply a lot of paint to the stencil, place on top of your paper and rub.

The next couple of shots show where I tried a tip Michelle shared for mono-printing brush strokes from an acetate onto your paper :

Paint on acetate

Smeared paint around with a brush

Mono-print onto painted paper

Second mono print onto white blotter paper

What did I learn from this one ? It can be a bit of a balancing act with acrylic paint and brush stroke mono-printing. How much paint to stroke one to your acetate to get a nice print of the brush stroke, but not too much to have a "paint blob" mono-print. Also, not to rub too hard, practice a little portion control I guess, to get better "strokes" printed.

Playing with paint, brushes, paper and all the other fun tools is really my idea of perfect art time ! I lose myself in the play, not really worrying about any end results but often falling in love with what comes out of it !

It even makes great left-overs ! Check out this blotter paper, where I rubbed off all my tools, getting every last bit of paint goodness off of them !

And this veteran of my play time (see the hand prints from the Shape Up Challenge), the card board I use to cover my play table. I think it will soon be retired and added to a journal or something.

A lot of great Crusaders have had a wonderful time playing with Brush Effects. Head over to the Street Team blog to check out their links as well as the wonderful tutorials and inspiration that Michelle provides! Then join us in the challenge fun !

Onward, Crusaders ! Happy Monday !