Creating Art with Long Forgotten Supplies

 

If you're like me, you buy lots of art supplies.  Lots and lots!  And then you play with them once or twice and stash them in a drawer. 

 

Last week I pulled out one of my 200+ drawers in the studio and when I closed it, something fell.  So each time I opened a lower drawer, it continued to drop, preventing all those subsequent drawers from closing.  What a mess.

 

Which meant letting it fall all the way to the bottom, and using a screw driver to remove that one to retrieve the contents.  And that meant emptying the drawer that held all the acrylic paint tubes, watercolor tubes, etc.  And there I found these jars of VIVA Paper Soft Colors. 

 

Since I had to take everything out of the drawer, I decided to play with these before putting them back.  Think water colors in a tub with a sponge on top.

 

 

The first application gives you a very soft color as seen in the above photo.  And if you know me at all, you know I don't do pastels.  So that meant a second application.

 

 

Much better, right? So I repeated that process for all 4 colors and then decided to add a little interest with my stencils.

 

 

First 2 colors were the yellow and lilac.  I could've gone over them multiple times, but this is just a background process, building layers, so it really doesn't matter how pale they look at this stage.

 

 

Now I have 2 of these completed.  This one and the very first photo at the top of the blog.  Of course nothing in my art is complete until I add rubber stamp images with black ink, so you know I'll be back to show you the end result.  Mostly I wanted to encourage you to pull out something you've ignored for years and play a little.

 

I had so much fun with this that last week I invited the ladies in my art group to give it a try.  If I'd been clever, I'd have taken photos of their finished pieces.  But of course, we finished with these colorants and moved on to distress paints on tags and small white pieces of cardstock, and before you knew it, we'd run long on our meeting and everyone had to dash.

 

One of these days I'll remember to take photos.  Just not last week.  We should all be impressed that I stopped long enough to post photos at all.