Dry Brush Effects in my Art Journal

I have had the best weekend in ages. Free from blogs and internet, and filled with culture and my kind of City Adventures. I’ve been to an art museum, a classical concert, spent time with old and new friend talking about art and writing, had dinner with family, bought a new-to-me magazine on literature, been to the art store – and filling up the well of inspiration in general.

Now sipping a hot cup of coffee and looking through emails.

Also, I’ve been experimenting with the “dry brush” method for the crusade of March: Brush effects! It’s described in a great book about acrylic methods that I own, Acrylic Revolution (New Tricks and Techniques for Working with the World’s Most Versatile Medium) by Nancy Reyner that I own. It’s something you might have tried without thinking about it. Experimenting with it more deliberately has been most interesting!

This is what I found out;

1. With almost no paint on the brush you can’t even stroke, you’ve got to push the dry brush down on the paper. This creates a cloud-like surface that I love. It’s dreamy. 2. You need a straggling (spretig) brush to “dry brush”. I’ve got a couple of old hard ones that are perfect. These are also the most beautiful ones in my “vase of brushes”. 3. With too much paint left on the brush you won’t get any fun results in “brush effects”. Then you’ll just be painting… hehe. If you want to dry brush your paper you should dip your brush into the paint and then wipe off excess on a paper towel! Make it dry, you know. 4. A layer-upon-layer surface is much easier to achieve if your brush is this dry, because you don’t have to wait for the paint layers to dry and it almost always leaves the surface underneath protruding in a layered way. Yummy surface!

And as you can see from all the 1-2-3-&-4 examples above painting on gesso gives even more texture.

Dreambrushing is a new term I invented… It’s when you create that cloudy surface with a very dry brush kind of weighted down into the page from above. I ♥ this surface!

Dry brushing is very fun to do on top of your collaged art too. It adds a layered feeling without hiding your pretty ephemera and paper fodder in paint! Try it out! I also like to do this with crayons, just very lightly letting the crayon dance above the collage. I guess I really have been finding a voice in my art, but you just don’t notice until you take a step back to look. I see progress and it’s a nice feeling to notice this.

Another method that came to mind when I read that Michelle drips paint from a watery brush to her page, was the Edge Spatter Technique (another name invented by me) that I love. That’s when you want to drip thick paint that just wont drip. Fill your paintbrush with paint and “spatter” it against the edge of a lid or your palette (my acrylic palette is a big plastic lid with half an inch edges) so that the paint will spatter onto your paper! This creates such cool raised dots! See this example from summer’s best outdoor smear, paint and spill session! :-)

This post is a contribution to Crusade #29 Brush effects that is all about “dry brush, dirty brush and monoprinting”. In the art store I got myself a brayer, finally! So after some monoprinting that’s what’s next in iHanna on the floor studio to experiment with!

♥ Inspiration that sparkles elsewhere…

♥ I could just stay here by the computer too. Sit with laptop in my knee making Photoshop brushes all day long. I haven’t even tried yet, I don’t know if I should… I think there is an(other) addiction coming on when I see Michelle Ward’s yummy tutorial!

♥ Extra link inspiration; 365 Picture Prompts – a daily prompt that launched March 15 at Creativity Portal. It doesn’t have a rss feed unfortunately, but I think it’s worth bookmarking and coming back to!