Playing with Paint and Fabric

Cyn Gagen

On yesterday’s Come2Chat, hosted by yours truly, I was playing around with some paint techniques and sort of mono-printing onto fabric.

The techniques I used were inspired by some I learned from Traci Bautista’s book Collage Unleashed.  I put down a piece of freezer paper shiny side up and then just squirted on some acrylic craft paint.  Then comes the playing around part.  You can scrape across the paint with old gift cards (or hotel keys or whatever), you can paint through some mesh (like the kind you get onions in or wrapped around pears) or on some bubble wrap and press that onto the paper, or you can run something like a popsicle stick or bamboo skewer through – randomly or to create a particular design.  In the picture above you can even see some circles where I used a toilet paper roll, pressed it into the paint, and then turned it to leave the circle shapes on the page.

Then I laid a piece of cotton broadcloth over the painted freezer paper.  I couldn’t find my brayer so I laid a piece of waxed paper (pictured above) over the fabric and then used a paint bottle as my brayer.  I saved the pieces of waxed paper with the paint on them as I can use these in mixed media work, ATCs, and greeting cards.

Instead of fabric, you can print onto paper towels as well.  Once you place the fabric or paper towel over the painted freezer paper, you can spritz it with water to get the paints to mix and blend some more, you can drip on some more paint, sprinkle on some glitter, and so on.  Once the paper above was dry, I used some Liquitex Gel Medium to collage on some Lutradur, tissue papers and candy wrappers.  You can keep layering on as much paint and other items as you want!

I scraped through the paint with a bamboo skewer on this one.

Now once you’ve taken a print or two off the freezer paper, maybe it has started drying up.  Well you have a couple choices.  You can just leave it as is and use it in a collage, ATC, greeting card or more or you can spritz it with some water to reactivate it and take more prints.

Can you see where I used jumbo bubble wrap and plastic mesh on this one?

Stay tuned to see where I take these fabric pieces and how I use them next!

Join us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern for Come2Chat.  It’s a casual chat time where we share what we’re working on in our studios while we chit chat.  http://linqto.com/rooms/creativeedventures