Splashing Through Life - Art by Patricia Henderson

At the Mary Todd Beam workshop, she showed us an easy way to make stamps. All you need is a small section of foam insulation that you can score and break into small pieces. From a craft or dollar store get some of the thin craft foam that has the peel-off backing. You can cut shapes from that and stick on to the pieces of insulation and voila! A stamp! I used some of these to stamp patterns on some paper to make collage material. I stamped the pattern first and then applied watered down acrylic paint. Fun!

In my last post I mentioned how you can use things around the house or purchased at the dollar store to create texture in watercolour or acrylics. Here are a few examples of some of the "tools" I use to create texture for my collage papers and for interesting backgrounds. Here I have some cheesecloth, Halloween spider webbing, and a styrofoam tray that holds test tubes. (I get these from work, we throw them out everyday so if you want some let me know. You'd just have to pay for the shipping!) The ever popular bubble wrap (also fun to pop while waiting for paint to dry!), the one with the squares is a mat for the sink, and I can't remember what the other thing is! The white one is for under rugs to keep them from slipping and the green one was for under placemats. The yellow stuff was in the craft section. Not sure what it's called. This texture was created by first underpainting in fluid acrylic, then applying another wash and placing the green mat ...