Saturday, March 3, 2012

Making Acrylic Paint 3-D...

and I'm not talking about using gel medium to make it "stand up". 

So here was my idea, gently mix different colors of acrylic paint on parchment paper then let dry for a few days.  For my first endeavor I decided to mix purple, lavender, pearl white and a gold tone color.
I decided that eventually they would become flowers so next I had to paint a canvas for them.  I didn't want to do the traditional green glass and blue sky so I pulled from these colors and made the sky beige and the grass purple (and tilted it sideways for fun).

I forgot to take pictures of the next step so bare with me. 
After a few days of letting my paint covered parchment paper dry completely I pealed the paint off.  In some spaces where the paint was a thinner layer it broke off but that was ok because I was going to rip it apart anyway.

Next came the fun part.  I balled up these pieces of dried acrylic paint and then glued them onto the canvas.  After I was pleased with the placement of these I noticed that I still had a big piece of dried acrylic paint leftover.  I decided to glue this towards the bottom and make it look like a vase.  Finally I painted the leaves and stems.  I had to spray a clear coat onto the flowers because when the paint started to get stiff it flaked very easy.
 When I took it to my studio space at Olde Towne Art my colleagues loved it!  Within 2 weeks it was sold (glad I took pictures!)  For our March show I decided to make another one but larger.  Same concept, more flowers and more 3-D.  This time I started by painting the canvas then picking the colors for the flowers.  The black vases may look like toilet paper rolls but they are actually bigger.
Don't these swirls look fun?

After I pealed them up from the parchment paper I made them into flowers, glued them down then painted the stems.

At first I was going to have the blue flowers in one vase, orange in the second and pink in the third but after I had it set up that way there seemed to be sort of a disconnect so I added colors from the other two to make it look a little bit more cohesive.  Here is a side view so you can see the three-dimensional effect:

And a close up shot:
It was well received last night at the opening of our new show but now I need more ideas of things I could turn these into because I'm sick of flowers now.

No comments: