New Art

[neva_ivan]

So,  I'm feeling pretty good about this one, even though yeah, I did have a little hair problem (turns out that you can see the white paper under the black where I cut it, which is fine for large black shapes, but not so great on hair.  I'll touch it up later).   And yeah, the guy looks a little stiff, you know in the awkward way, not the dirty way

Comments

[neva_ivan]

You really should try--the options are limitless. The only thing I would say is that it takes a few tries to get the hang of it!

I use this:

http://www.utrecht.com/udispaints.html

Which is an acrylic gel medium--it comes in matte finish too, but for me I prefer gloss.

With the gel medium I paint the entire surface with the medium, and the surface can be wood, canvas, card board (I don't suggest paper as it can warp too easily). In this case I used a premade canvas board. Then while the thin coat of gel is still wet I place my first cuts of paper on and smooth them down, often using the handle of my brush like a rolling pin. My first coat here were squares and bits of blue for the sky and black for the ground. Then I painted all over that layer with the gel and started adding other elements.

The only thing with the gel medium is that I don't recommend it for general decoupage, like of furniture for example. It will eventually dry to a very nice finish but it stays softer, like paints for several days.

For general decoupage, I'd suggest what I used to use Mod Podge

http://www.dickblick.com/zz029/16/

I'd do the whole picture in Mod Podge and then once it was nice and dry I'd put several coats of a clear varnish over the whole thing. You can use a yellowish varnish for an "antique" look.

Many years ago I did my pictures with regular glue and didn't coat the whole thing, but as you can imagine those don't last as well.

There are all kinds of tricks to doing this sort of thing, but some ways to get your feet wet are just general collage--say cutting out images you like and putting them together in new and interesting ways, or you could do what I first did which was work larger with construction paper which allows you to play around a bit more. I switched to cutting colors from magazines because I fell in love with the colors and textures I could get, but I must say that magazine paper is often less forgiving.

If you do the decoupage with varnish route it is fairly easy to have some very nice looking things in no time at all--almost anything can be decoupaged from wooden boxes that once held fancy tea to flower pots. I've seen people do some very cool things.

Oh, and one final note on the acrylic medium--it is really cool to use if you plan to really mix things up. I can do the picture with the medium and then I can put almost anything over top. In this case I only used a bit of ink, but I could use acrylic paint for touch ups, or even add oil paints, which I would not do if I were using Mod Podge.

Actually, I've even done some where I've added small found objects or flatish sculpy things I've made and then glued them down with the medium, then painted over them with medium, effectively sealing them in. Really the sky's the limit!