35) Texture techniques

I stopped going to the painting classes in the institute of Peruano - Japones because it was way too far from my house and i had to go every other day without a car, so i started checking for other places near my house and i found IDEAS.

IDEAS is a contemporary store where you can get materials, paintings, and all sorts of things for interiors that had been beautifully decorated, such as cup holders, picture frames, trays, cups, plant pots, etc. And apart from that, they offered different kinds of classes to be able to decorate our interiors using techniques that i had never seen before.

I took classes twice a week for almost 2 months.

Texture techniques. Ideas. Summer 2009.

Mixed media on board.

I made this piece thinking of it as a practice board because all i did was use an empty space on the board to learn a new technique. The teacher would teach me a technique and i would apply it to my board without even thinking that it could end up being a nice piece of art.

I learnt crazy ways of creating different textures like using crumpled plastic bags (to create the texture in the yellow background), or sponge molds to crate image stamps with molding paste (the gray image in the center), using a special rubber comb to create the gray wavy texture with molding paste at the left, or even using bleach to create those random round dots painted in red.

Also, i learnt how to use oil paint properly. My entire life, ever since i started painting, i was always using acrylics and for once i tried oil paint and the effect that the oil paint gives in wood surfaces is much nicer than acrylics i think, specially since it lasts longer for it to dry, there's more opportunities to create more textures and transparencies.

That metal looking effect that i gave to the stamp in the middle and to the wave image was very simple. first i painted the entire surface with black acrylics and once the paint was dry, i put a layer of silver acrylic paint on top. A very important thing to have with you when making this decorations is a piece of cloth. Right after i put the silver layer on my surface i would gently wipe off the paint from the relief of the stamp so that the background would be darker, making the stamp stand out even more.

Im not sure if i explained that very well but the point is that it create a lovely effect if you ever want something to look like metal.