Welcome to week 8 of the Surface Treatment Workshop. This week’s focus is on using gesso. Mostly gesso is just used to prime a surface before adding paint or other media but I decided to make more of a feature of it with my samples for this week…
In the above collage I painted four squares of gesso onto the paper – clockwise: dark grey, black, light grey and white. Then I simply added strips of vintage paper over the joins. I finished by putting four small squares of my own art work in each box. Very simple to do and a very simple design. I really like the neutral colours.
Next I decided to have a play with some tinted gesso. Using one of my larger paint mixing trays I set about mixing white gesso with acrylic paint. I found you only needed very tiny amounts of paint to turn the white gesso into some lovely pastel colours. In the sample above I used gesso tinted with sepia, indigo and just plain white gesso. Down the left side is a strip of fabric roses which I painted with indigo gesso.
How both samples look in my sketchbook.
One of the prompts in the book was to stick objects items onto the surface and gesso over them. I decided to stick some vintage lace to my acrylic paper and gesso over them:
On the left side the lace is painted with Sepia gesso and the for the blue side I used Prussian Blue gesso overlaid with some white gesso to tone down the blue a little. For the next samples I decided to add some more colours to my paint tray – to the Sepia, Indigo and Prussian Blue I added Paynes Grey, Yellow Ochre and Turquoise….
I used a large brush and a palette knife for the above samples. All the colours work really well together and the palette knife helped to create some lovely textures. This is how these samples look in my sketchbook:
More tinted gesso samples:
The samples with stripes on I used some corrugated cardboard to stamp gesso onto my paper – stamping with gesso was one of the prompts in the book we’re working from. I also stuck some of the corrugated card I used into my sketchbook. This is how both these pages look in my sketchbook:
I really enjoyed playing with gesso this week. I found my imagination ran overtime – I have so many other ideas for using gesso than what you see here but I just didn’t have time to explore them all this week. So I will have another play with gesso another time.
Just click on any of the images to view them larger…
Next week we are going to do Week 7 (which we missed out) and Week 10 together as they both focus on using acrylic gels – it’s going to be fun !
These are really beautiful. All of them with such a calmness to them.
Thank you Claudia!
Oh Evelyn. You create blue and brown magic with whatever you do!!!
Thank you Jodi!
Thank you for sharing this.I now have the book you are working from so will start playing soon.I love the colours’s that both you and your sister work with .It must be the West Country sea and sky’s that inspired you both to do such wonderful art works.
Susan
Thank you Susan – I hope you have as much fun as Carolyn & I with this book. I find a huge amount of my inspiration comes from the sea and the coast…
Oh, my goodness, Evelyn, the roses and the lace are my most favorite ones yet!! They are both so very, very beautiful.
Thank you Lisa! I like the lace too…
It’s always such a treat to see the creative process through other artist’s work. Very much enjoyed this post Evelyn. Best wishes.
Thank you Andrew!
your attitude, your approach, your images ……. are Very Inspiring! cheers, Debi
Thank you Debi – that’s a huge compliment coming from an experienced (and very good!) artist like yourself… !
your work is every bit as good! in fact, your versatility surpasses and it makes me smile to see such risk taking 🙂
I think I take risks because I’m so keen to learn and improve my art work – I just have to take that leap into the unknown and see where I end up… !