Collage Unleashed - Odd Painting Tools

Hey people!! I'm back, and although it's very late yet again, I am here. I'm hoping that tomorrow I'll be able to get the post to you earlier in the day, but the way I figure it, later in the evening is better than not at all. Am I right? :) Maybe some Saturday I should just do a bunch of posts and schedule them to post. Then every day I can make a new one and schedule that one too. Huh. Interesting. That might actually work. We'll see. We will see. So today's post is another in my work through of the book Collage Unleashed by Traci Bautista. I've done these posts many times before, and I love how I can incorporate her techniques into my work. It makes me feel special. :) So anyways. Back to the topic at hand. What I decided to do today was sort of experiment with painting with odd tools. She has a long list at the end of Chapter 1 (I haven't worked through all of it yet, I just thought this would be a cool part to look at) of a bunch of different things that can be used to create new and unique textures. I picked three different things to work with, and added three different layers to three entirely different pages. Let's start with the chopstick, shall we?

The first thing that I really wanted to focus on was the chopstick. It's a plastic one, from a fairly nice set that we got at one of those chinese restaurants. I thought that it would be cool to try and use it for a page with texture, so I took out my trusty pallet, filled one of the channels with a nice turquoise acrylic and then just dipped the stick it. Then I just scraped it all around the page. It took a little bit of work to get it to the point where I liked it, but when I finally got there, it was definitely worth every bit of effort that I put into it. So I think that using a chopstick for texture was a great success. For sure.

The next thing I used was a toothbrush. Now, I've used toothbrushes before in my work, but they've definitely been becoming a lot more prominent in my recent pieces than they have in the past. For this page, I decided to use what was left of the blue paint from the last page, so anywhere that you see that turquoise color on this spread was done with the toothbrush. I really appreciate and respect the texture that the toothbrush gives, but personally I have found two faults with it. One, I find that I press too hard when I'm working with it and will often times work my way through the paper. The second problem with it is the fact that it just doesn't spread the paint very far. The paint gets caught up in the bristles, and won't come out, and I think I end up wasting a lot more paint than I'm using. Which is obviously disappointing.

And now for my last and final page. Here I have a spread where I added a layer of texture and color with a ball that I made out of masking tape. This is probably the most interesting texture that I have gotten thus far on the pages, even though this particular page isn't really my favorite. Basically I just took a long strip of tape off of my roll, crumpled it up into a little ball and used it as a stamp. I tried to use it to spread the paint around the page, but it just came across as messy and sloppy, which certainly wasn't the message that I was trying to convey. Obviously this page needs a lot of work, as do the rest of the pages I had here. But I am having fun experimenting and sharing it on here with you guys. And so, until we meet again, I bid you a farewell.