Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!!  Even Latte is getting in the spirit today with her fun little shamrock background.  Speaking of backgrounds, I had some MAJOR fun playing with Gesso and realized that I totally forgot to share it with you, so here you go…

The challenge was to play with newspaper and gesso, and so I did!

I tore some pieces out of the paper in weird shapes because, well, I could, and glued them with Multi-Medium to my Multi Media Spiral Book.  Yup, once again, brave me is working directly in the book!

Then I went to town with the Gesso, both black and white, and even made grey!  I’m sorry I have no in-between photos of this – I was on a roll!  I even stamped in the gesso with the stamp that comes with one of the Gelatos Stamp Sets.  IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!!!!!

Could you tell I had fun???  I used a foam brush to spread the Gesso because I’m not a fan of the dirty hands things.  I will confess I did have to get a touch messy when my stamp got stuck in the Gesso (that white flower on the left-hand side of the page).  I left the Gesso dry for about 4 hours, because I had chores to do, but it was dry well before that.

Next, I lightly spritzed with Pearlized Water and colored with 4 different Gelatos (of course, right??).

I love how the Gelatos really make the texture pop off the page!  I put my notes on the page, and that was it… it was super easy, but OH SO FUN!

Of course I had to make a note to remind myself about the FABULOUS grey gesso!  And here is the final product with all the supplies used:

The black/grey gesso made all the shadows for me, and I only used 1 color of each Gelato to make the project.  There’s a new challenge up right now to use splatter that I’m hoping to get to today… I may need a little Luck o’ the Irish to be able to get into the stamp room, though.  How about you? What are your crafty plans today??

Perhaps, you could make a project for our current Male Birthdays challenge?  We DO give a prize, you know…

Yesterday’s Mixability challenge on SCS got me PLAYING like there was no tomorrow! Dina asked that we watercolor.  Sounds simple enough, but she shared this AWESOME video, and it got me thinking, what all COULD I watercolor with?  OH, the possibilities!!!

Here’s what I did…

Now, here’s how I did it (warning, long post!)…

First, I actually started with something NEW. I decided to try to watercolor with the Big Brush pens. It actually works VERY well, and would probably do great for that scene that Dina shows in her video. I wet the paper first, then ran a streak of the big brush over the wet watercolor paper. After I had done all of my streaks, I sprayed with Pearlized Water, which is just a mixture of Perfect Pearls and water in a Mister bottle (and shaken VERY well), and then tipped the paper to let it run just a bit like Dina did.  Here’s what it looks like…

But that was not the end of my playing! I pulled out my trusty Gelatos (you knew THAT was coming!). Again, I wet the paper first, then again streaked the Gelato over top. When I had all the colors on there, I sprayed with water, but just tapped my fingers on it to create the little polka dot looking dots.  That was the closest I could get to what Dina did in the video with her fingers.  Here’s the result…

Next up were the Claudine Hellmuth’s FABULOUS Studio Paints.  I put little blobs (still looking for a better word on that!) on my Craft Sheet and spritzed with Pearlized Water.  The pigment in the paint is very strong, and you really don’t need much at all.  Here is all I used:

On my first play session with these FUN paints, I wet the paper first (notice a theme yet??) and then made streaks across the paper in a sort-of plaid pattern with a wet brush. Wetting the paper first makes a gorgeous pastel look. I tried it again with dry paper and got completely different results. I absolutely LOVE the variety of looks you can get with just a few colors of Studio Paint!

But I STILL wasn’t done playing just yet… I was like, what else can I use?   I said – I wonder if I can use Liquid Pearls.  YES!!!  I did the same thing I did with the Studio Paint on the Craft Sheet and spritzed with water.  I used plain water instead of Pearlized Water, because these little guys are already so sparkly coming out of the tube, but it looks like the water dilutes that a LOT.  You do need to use very saturated colors of Liquid Pearls for this, otherwise, it will just wash out the color altogether.  Here is my first attempt, and you can only see 1 color and barely of another.

The second time, I used much darker colors and LOVE the results… I’m thinking Christmas cards here… I may used Pearlized Water next time to make it totally shine.

And finally, I HAD to try the watercolor look with a stamp.  I took the Fall Tendril stamp and spritzed it first with water, then added a variety of fall colors of Big Brush pens. Then, I spritzed again and stamped the image.  I LOVE THIS!!!!  I’m SO doing this again!

I realized I didn’t try doing anything with ink, so I think there is more playing in my future… HUGE thanks to Dina for making me think about my supplies differently!!!  Have a great weekend, and happy playing!!