Winter Wonderland

I've been playing with some of the new art media I purchased recently. In the Yahoo group called art techniques, members were raving about this stuff called glass beads gel medium. This was a couple of weeks ago and I remembered seeing some of this at Michael's. Everyone was really excited about some of the effects you could pull off with this stuff, so the next time I visited Michael's I bought some.

It doesn't photograph too well (my bad), but if you look closely at the bottom of the page you'll see the glass beads. This stuff is pretty cool. When you open the jar you have to stir it up a little bit and you spread it on with a knife, like frosting a cake. You can put it on as thin or as thick as you'd like. I drew a winter tree, painted it and then added the glass beads to the bottom. After it dried I decided to add some to the branches, too, to give them a snowy effect. The glass beads dry to a spongy texture. I like this stuff and will use it in my skinny book scene I'm working on.

The other medium I was curious about was something called, "iridescent medium". I ordered this from DickBlick since nobody here had any. It's really cool, too. You add it to your paint and it makes the colors iridescent. Very pretty. I glazed some of my new Golden Fluid Acrylic Phthalo Blue and then added the iridescent medium to it. I loved the color. Again, it doesn't photograph very well, but the blue turned out with some iridescent pinks and greens to it. Very nice against the background. If you click on the photo, you may be able to see a better view.

Then, of course, I had to add some Swarovski crystals to finish the job. I think this does mimic a small part of a winter wonderland. Now back to playing...