Archive for the ‘Materials & Techniques’ Category
3 Ways to paint with Bubbles
Bubble painting is a classic children’s art activity, and it’s easy to see why – it’s easy, cheap, kids love it, and the results are pretty good too, but bubbles are also amazingly versatile, we’ve tried 3 different techniques now, and each one has distinctively different results. Bubble Painting #1 The first [...]
Pin ItValentine Heart Canvas
This canvas was created mainly as an excuse to experiment with acrylic string gel medium. I saw the following video on YouTube, and was inspired to try it out for myself. String gel is basically an acrylic painting medium that makes your paint more ‘stringy’ or stretchy, allowing you effectively to ‘draw’ directly with the [...]
Pin ItWatercolour Spray Inks
Ever since I first heard about watercolour sprays, I’ve been wanting to try them out. The ones you can buy ready-made are I discovered quite expensive, so I decided to create my own using the new powdered water-colour inks I’ve recently treated myself to. That way I can control the dilution I want, mix the [...]
Pin ItDip-dyed Landscapes
I love water-colour, I love landscape art, and I also love the dip-dyed effect. However in spite of my love of watercolour, I’ve never really mastered it as a technique – as a medium it can be difficult to control – and perhaps that’s where my problem has always been, I was trying to control [...]
Pin ItThe Art of Mud
Mud is a versatile and under-rated material, and lets face it there’s a lot of it about. It has (and still is in some parts of the world) been used for a huge variety of purposes by mankind for millennia, for building, medicinal and beauty purposes, and making pots to name just a few, and [...]
Pin ItDecorative Paste Papers & Cards
I came across this technique over at Art for Small Hands where there is a detailed tutorial for undertaking this as a classroom activity. It’s a traditional technique, which, like marbling, was often used in the 18th and 19th centuries for decorating the endpapers of books. As an activity it’s cheap, easy and a lot [...]
Natural Paints
This time of year is good for experimenting with natural paints and pigments. It’s easy to forget that in the not too distant past, all dyes and paints had to be obtained from the natural world, directly from animals, minerals and plants. The resulting colours may not always have been as bright as those obtained [...]
Sun Prints
Inspired by Suzanne at SkyBlueSea, I decided to have a go at Sun Prints with the kids. The proper name for these is Cyanotypes, and it is a technique first developed in the early days of photography by Sir John Herschel in 1842. In fact they are the original ‘blue-prints’. They’re really simple to do [...]
Art Materials – Wax Crayons
It’s been a little while since I started this series off with Canvas, and I thought it was about time I continued it. This time I’m going to look at that staple tool of any self-respecting budding artist – wax crayons. Traditional, cheap, practical, easy to use, these are so ubiquitous that their creative potential [...]
Art Materials – Kicking off with Canvas
I am introducing a new regular informative series to Artful Adventures on the subject of Art materials – I’m not sure yet quite how regular this will be, but there are lots of art materials out there, with new ones being introduced all the time so there’s plenty of material to go at (no pun [...]
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