Gloss Paints on Gel Crayon Mixed Media Background Technique
- Jun 10, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 17, 2023
I'm pretty sure they make new art products by just smashing older ones together and see what turns out. That sounds fun, but I'd be afraid I'd explode something by concocting something I shouldn't have.
My point, however, is that mixing different materials is fun. I mean, we have a whole art genre on doing it.
But how often have you picked up two coloring mediums and seen what they look like together? Cuz that's what I'm asking you to do with me in this tutorial.
It's easy peasy, colorful, and you might get to make a mess. Whoo-hoo! Messes!
Materials:
Gloss acrylic or craft paints
Card stock, art journal or canvas
This is less technique and more of an experiment, I would say. We're just layering a couple of mediums and checking out the results. Layering is a big part of mixed media. Check out this post by Bev G on Felt Magnet on techniques for mixed media layering.
But first, here's how I started...
I grabbed my gel crayons.
They make all sorts of this style medium. I think I threw in some paint sticks during this first step, also.
And then I started scribbling and filling in areas of my card stock.
Since one of the beauty's of gel crayons is that they are very smudgable - I did some smudging around.
I made these colored swatches all over my pages...
Then I added my second layer of gloss paints.
I thought it would be fun to use different sponges to apply it.
And in the end, I had some awesome colorful background papers to play with.
Please leave a comment about what other mediums are fun to layer like this.
Plus, check out how the gloss shines on top of the gel layer.
I made a little mixed media artist trading card house out of a piece of the papers:
And if you liked this background technique, you might like these:
Check out the supplies on Amazon:
This post hit me right in the messy, curious part of my brain that still misses being a kid with dirty fingers. I’ve done the gloss paint over gel crayon thing before—total accident while testing supplies for a D&D diorama I was printing from https://www.gambody.com/ — and learned the hard way that some gel crayons stay waxy underneath, so the paint beads up like water on a car windshield unless you really scrub it in or use a dry sponge. A matte medium layer in between helps, but honestly the cracks and weird texture can look cool too. My advice: don’t expect perfection, just scribble hard, push the paint around, and let it dry overnight before you judge it. The real fun is when you tear the page out later and use it as collage paper for something else.