From Black Lava to Gold Flake

For today's post, I've experimented -- with no expectations! -- starting with a sheet of watercolor paper partially coated with black acrylic paint that has dried.

Across the horizontal white space, starting on the left, I placed 6" x 6" Bulbs and Banners s955 (cut from its original square frame and stained green from an earlier project) and followed that with two pieces cut from 9" x 12" Kelp Forest L963 (likewise paint-stained from earlier projects.)  

 

Above:  Having opened a jar of Liquitex Black Lava acrylic medium (upper left), I've dug into it with a plastic artist's spatula (lower right.)  Below: Holding firmly onto each piece, I've begun to spread the medium through the openings.

Above:  I've lifted off all three of the scissors-altered masks.  Now most of the paper's surface appears near-black, but it will become darker as the lava medium dries, since the lava medium has a white gel vehicle that will turn from white to clear as the medium dries.

Below:  The gel medium has dried.

Next, as shown below, I've used an old brush and palette paper (on the left) to mix Golden Acrylics Manganese Blue liquid paint with Liquitex liquid gloss medium.  With the brush I've begun to spread this mixture across the painting.

After the diluted blue paint has been spread across the paper -- but before it had dried -- I returned with a damp terrycloth rag to wipe back some of the paint, leaving random leave white areas, shown below.

Then I set the piece aside to let the blue layer dry overnight; it needed to be bone-dry before I could use crayons.

Below:  After black lava acrylic gel medium has dried, its gift to us is a gritty surface that welcomes crayon scribbles ....

Above:  This close-up detail shows the two water-soluble crayons that I used.  But any crayons would work.

Below:  I followed the crayon scribbles with Golden Paint's gold mica flakes (small) gel medium, spreading it with the artist's spatula (upper right.)

A close-up detail --

Above:  Like black lava gel medium, gold mica flake gel medium has a vehicle that's white upon application.  Even in this thinly spread layer of gel, the whitish gel is apparent as a faintly cloudy background that dulls the gold.  But the gold will sparkle when the gel has dried into a clear, invisible layer.

A view of the finished piece is below. It's slightly cropped to better show the glitter.

Since today's featured masks are shown in their scissor-customized forms, I'll show the originals below --

6" x 6" Bulbs and Banners s955

9" x 12" Kelp Forest L963

Thank you for stopping to check out my blog today! Daily posts will continue for some little while to show more suggestions for using my new three masks based on formations of Giant Bulb Kelp.  To scroll thru the pages of my stencils and masks at StencilGirlProducts.com, please start here.