Smearing Paint Directly Onto Old Book Pages For Mixed Media Collage

 If you sometimes need a break form washing paint brushes, consider pouring or dabbing a little paint directly onto your surface and smearing with a pice of folded up cardboard or a credit card. I like to randomly draw onto pages with a Sharpie pen and that cover some of my marks with paint. I often will go back over the dried paint and draw shapes and lines on top of the blotches. Then I tear up my painted pages and create abstract collages. I find old books at library tag sales and other places where tattered or old books are either tossed away or sold for under a dollar. 

Slanting Lines and Shapes To Create Movement in Mixed Media Art

Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift of some of your shapes to create the suggestion of movement or energy in an otherwise still collage.  You will see that I tilted the large greenish- grey shape on the left to add some oomph to the composition. It doesn't take much to accomplish an important variance in the orientation of shapes and lines. If I had slanted too many shapes I would be back where I started from with a monotonous composition. It is the importance of surprise that matters. Also important to note is that once I made this change, everything else seemed to feel quite right.  

Mark Making And Drawing With Masking Fluid in Abstract Mixed Media

West Hartford Art League student Jeudi Carr.

How many of us buy art supplies that we put on a shelf or forget about? That is the sorry outcome of what happened to my bottle of  Masking fluid....it was neglected after i bought it on a whim one day.. Then a few weeks ago one of my students brought a bottle of Masking fluid to class. She essentially "drew" with this rubber cement like product  and then peeled the dried fluid off the paper leaving areas that remained white instead of painted. The fluid is very easy to work with and can be applied in numerous ways from pouring, dribbling or brushing onto work. The results were exciting and I now feel quite confident that I too will soon join the club of artists who use Masking fluid as a resist in Mixed media artwork. My bottle of Masking fluid will soon be cracked open and loved instead of abandoned.