I’ve been having a little play with some (lots) of paints and inks over the last few evenings as a sort of way to unwind from thinking about all of things that I’ve been trying to achieve.

I’m very pleased with the results and I think that when you find out some of the techniques, you may be a little surprised…

This post features the first (that was dry, lol).

Anyway, here is the first of a trio of canvases which ended quite differently but all used a majority of the same materials.

Pretty abstract and cool right?!

Now, I said that you might be surprised at some of the ‘ingredients’ in this, well, the main one that should surprise you a lot is the fact that I used paper kitchen towel to create the texture – no, seriously!

Before doing any painting I applied a good layer of Mod Podge to the canvas, placed the kitchen towel over the top lightly pressed it down and then dragged it.

As I dragged, it creased and wrinkled.

It was left to dry for, well, it did end up on the Work In Progress pile for a while until this week when I started having a dig through for something to chill out with in the evening.

I’ve seen a lot of drop painting of late and thought that I would have a go at that; the colours would rub down the canvas and create cool patterns as they went.

Before starting to dribble (a usual evening thing when I pop a DVD on) I painted the blank area with a buff/pink mix.

Already I was seeing things in the design and one particular idea was that this could be a volcanic mountain range of somewhere like Venus with it’s heavy and sulpherous atmosphere.

I can’t say that this drove my colour choices. I only have a few of the pearlescent liquid acrylic paints so it was mostly that.

Before getting to these I gave the ‘mountains’ a base coat of burgundy acrylic over which I applied a translucent black glaze and heat set it.

I then began to randomly dribble the liquid acrylics down the canvas with the ‘rocky’ bit at the top. I heat set each layer of colour to prevent the colours bleeding too much.

It was fun to watch the colours collect in the wrinkles and folds and then explode from the ‘volcanoes’.

Occasionally I spritzed the canvas with water to give the colours a little more translucency and to help them spread. That’s why you’ll see the background dribbles are more muted than the others.

I did several applications over a couple of nights until I thought I was close to finishing. I then applied a coat of clear embossing powder over the ‘sky’ and did a final dribble with each colour and left it to fully dry.

The penultimate stage was to apply some dark blue and black acrylic paint (with a sponge) to the edges of the canvas.

To finish and protect the canvas I applied a final layer with some clear gloss spray from Crafter’s Companion.

And that was the ‘Mountains Of Venus’ complete!

What do you think? A waste of good paint or a fun and interesting experiment?

I’d love to hear what you see in this creation …

Many thanks for reading, I’ll have the second in this canvas series on the blog tomorrow at around the same time. What will this one end up like?! (It’s like the end of the old Batman series isn’t it? lol).

Anyway, must crack on – more to do before Christmas!

As ever, if you’ve any questions or comments about this post, please feel free to use the comments section at the bottom of this post.

Ciao for now!

J :)