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Showing posts from March, 2017

Total Eclipse of the Heart - a tutorial

Total Eclipse of the Heart Cyndi Lavin, 2017 1. Paint watercolor paper with mixture of black gesso and turquoise acrylic .  Let dry thoroughly.  Spread on watered down white gesso and cover with plastic wrap.  Peel off slowly before completely dry. 2. Working on one half at a time, run a bead of India ink along the center and allow to drip towards the edges.  Use black on the upper half and white ink on the lower.  The white will mix a bit with the black.  Spray the ink with two coats of Krylon acrylic spray .   3. Paint the piece with very watered down acrylics, adding and blotting to build up the layers. Acrylic colors used: Dioxazine purple , Red oxide , Yellow ochre , and Iridescent copper   This post contains affiliate links Copyright 2017 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. The tutorial may be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, includi

Spring Snow - a tutorial

Spring Snow Cyndi Lavin, 2017 1. Apply tissue paper to watercolor paper with gloss medium .  Spray paper to wet it, and add India ink drips from near the top (piece shown upside down from the way it was worked).  Smudge Quinacridone crimson and Cobalt turquoise acrylics near top and use white gesso on a foam brush to smear it down the page.  Add Hansa yellow light with fingers to any white areas and to highlight the tissue paper. 2. Mist with water and allow colors to mingle.  Dig circle shapes through the upper layers of paint with biscuit cutters.  Add some smears of Interference violet paint.  Add Medium magenta paint to what is now the bottom of the piece. 3. Stamp with bubble wrap.  Use masking tape to create plant shapes.  I hate that shape in the middle, so I'll have to figure out a way around it! 4. Use a foam roller to lightly roll white gesso over plant shapes.  When dry, remove them. 5. Cut out pieces from the whole, a

Experiments with gesso masks

Instead of using just acrylics and gesso, I wanted to try Derwent Inktense acrylic ink pencils to see what gesso masks would look like with them as the background.  My recommendations from these experiments is that whether you want your colors to blend or to stay put, you will have quite a bit of control with the pencils. I grabbed some of the brightest colors and scribbled all over a small piece of watercolor paper .  Then I misted them with a spray bottle of water and moved them around slightly to blend some of the edges. For my first experiment, I cut out some leaf shapes from card stock and rolled over them with white gesso , applying it heavily enough to obscure the background, but not entirely. I added the vine after the fact :-) On a second smaller piece, cut from the end of the first, I rearranged the leaves into petals.  This time, I added some opaque magenta to the white gesso before the first rolling.    After rolling with white, I left the p

Justice - a mixed media painting

Justice Cyndi Lavin, 2017 A few weeks ago, I got to hear a recording of Martin Luther King's wonderful speech that is commonly known as the "I have a dream" speech.  It always stirs me.  Although I didn't have this in mind specifically when I painted the background, I soon decided to add the lettering for the portion of the speech that King paraphrased from Amos 5:24: No, no, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. The technique for painting this is basically the same as Firefly's Dance from a few weeks ago.  The major difference is that I first adhered a layer of wrinkled tissue paper to my substrate before painting. Acrylic colors used: Permanent violet dark , Quinacridone violet , Light green , Pyrrole orange Other materials: White gesso , Black Pitt pen   This post contains affiliate links Copyright 2017 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted