Mixed Media Masterclass

1. Introduction: welcome to Mixed Media Master Class. This is a collection of techniques where you can add to your mixed media repertoire. We're going to have great fun here. It's actually one of about three classes. I've found so many new techniques, and I didn't realize how much I knew and what I could share with you that I divided it up into three different parts. So this is the very first master class, and so I'm just going to call it Masterclass one. And I have all kinds of techniques that I can share with you, and we're going to have fun learning new techniques to add to your mixed media paintings. Just have fun and enjoy each technique and then adopt the ones you love and ignore the ones you don't. So we'll see you in the next part where I talk about the materials you need. 2. Materials you will need: Welcome back. The materials you will need for this course is acrylic paint. Sometimes you can use watercolor. If you like water color, choose your favorite colors and then add black point. You will need brushes and different sizes. You're going to need surfaces. The paint on. You can use canvas paper board anything that will work. Uh, whatever your preference use I often use board or illustration. Board for the very wet techniques and canvas or paper for the others. You'll need plastic to cover your table with. You will need containers for water. You only Jessel most black and white. You will need items to make texture with. You will need a glue gun. Now here's some optional supplies. Spray paint, a variety of colors, pencils, masking tape, a variety of brushes, packing tape, stencils, home core pieces of craft, foam, spackle or drywall compound any craft glue or some kinks to now. There are probably supplies that I missed simply because, um, I forgot about them, but I will live the supplies for each section. So look at the beginning of every section. You'll tell you exactly what you need for that section. So what we would need as well is a space of your own. You'll need a spot to create. A lot of these techniques are very messy, So can you locate a spot in your house where you can leave something undisturbed to dry Here on In this picture, I have a book holding down some paintings because I want the texture to get really deep into the paper, so you will need a table to work on. You will need a plastic sheet to cover it, so keep that in mind. If you can find a corner in your basement or a corner, and even in a closet where you can leave the items to dry, it will help enormously. So we'll see you in the next section, where I do a review of how to do Kalash See you there. 3. Gel transfer: Welcome to Photo transference. There are many ways of making folder transfers. The one we're going to take right now is called a gel transfer. It's been around since the 19 fifties, and it's been used by artists all over the place. It almost guarantees success, so it's a very reliable way to create a photo transfer. And what you need for this exercise is one brush acrylic gel. Soft gel works really well. Ah, for the copy of something you love. High contrast for the copies air Better High contrast means you need something with a lot of black and a lot of weight. Not much for Gray and then need a painting to put it on. This is where you learn to make the gel sandwich to make everything work, and we'll see this on the video that's just next. So I have one painting. I have my photos copies and I have my gel and the brush. Now my photocopy is something I want to use to make it look like a texture. I photocopied a newspaper that's 100 years old, and it's been copied so many times. You convey rarely read the text, but that's exactly what I want. I don't want people to read my painting. I want them to look at the painting and the text is just there to add extra texture. Now you do just what I did. Right now you take your photocopy, you put gel in at you, put gel on your painting and then you create the sandwich so it's faced down. The photocopy goes face down right onto the gel. So you have gel on the campus or the painting like now, don't be cheap with your gel. Make sure that you have a good quantity. If there is no jail and there is no contact between the gel and the ink, there is no transfer. So if you drop it like this, make sure you go back and just add more jail again. You can make copies in color as well. If you want. They don't work quite a swell. They're not as reliable. Black and white is almost guarantee. And it works really well. But you might want to experiment with color before you put it onto your painting. Find the right photocopy to add to your painting. Not all color copies work well, so make sure that you rob gently to eliminate all the bubbles. Now here's the steps again. Jail on your full copy jail on your painting and make sure it's a generous amount. Gel sandwich comes next. We put gel to jail just like a jelly sandwich. Then you tap and rub gently. Make sure you don't get any gel on the white part, or the paper will stick to your painting forever. Then you need to let this dry. I recommend 24 hours if you want. You can do it in less time, but there's no guarantee the gel will be dry. Here is my painting. My gel is dry now. What I do is I wept the paper with water and then I rubbed with my fingers just like that, and the paper comes out. What should have happened is the ink sticks to the gel. The gel sticks to the painting and then you take away the paper and you have a gel transfer . You. It's old, uh, very easy. This is one of the techniques that I like the most because it's so reliable. Keep in line. If the jail doesn't touch the ink, there will be no transfer. So make sure that your gel and your ink, uh, touch. So see how easy that is. Sometimes you may have toe wet the paper twice just because the paper hasn't soaked enough . But it's a very easy process, and I'm sure you can do this. This is so easy. So your assignment is Try one of these ah, photo transfers with gel and we'll see you in the next section. 4. Packing tape transfer: Welcome to another type of photo transfer. This is called a packing tape transfer. This is really fun, and it's almost instantaneous. You'll really enjoy this process. The only downside is that you're limited to the size of the packing tape. You can overlap it occasionally, but there's no guarantee that the tape will actually stick together. So for this exercise, you need one roll of packing tape, one painting to put it on and some magazines or newspaper to try the tape on. This is what you need. Remember that travel magazines or National Geographic magazines are the best, So let me show you in this video. So here is my packing tape. It's a wide tape that you used for parcels, and then you just put it on a shiny paper. Newspapers work really well, but the shiny paper, like something that comes out of a National Geographic, is perfect travel magazines or even better because they're nice and shiny and easy. So just make sure that your papers about the size of your packing tape that's the size it iss. And then you stick that in water. You can do more than one other time, so I just let it soak for a little while. Notice that I rubbed really well on the back of the transfer. So I'll put tape on this one, and I only want part of it. I don't want the whole thing, so I rub really hard using a flat hard surface. Works well too. So then I take away the paper I don't want and I'm left with that collage area. So now I want to do this text. So I put it there, and I am caught it. I'm trying to go fast. I did speed up the video, so I'm not. I don't use the work that fast now, and we're going to do to tapes wide. So rob really? Well, make sure there's an overlap between the two tapes that will ensure that your tape will stick together and I only want this part. So that's the part I'm going to soak if we just stick it in water and then you take it out once it's soaked A while you rob it just like that one. And then the paper comes off the ink from the paper sticks to the tape, and then, uh, you're left with that. So I put it back in the water to have it stick again. So now I'm starting to rob. Here's how I rubbed that second piece off and remember all that color off those musicians. That's what we were looking at. And I speeded up the tape because sometimes you have to rub for a while to get all that paper off. And here's what I get. Now I take the that was the National Geographic. So I take the National Geographic and I robbed the paper off and that had an overall blue element on the back. So I will rub some of these, like take more time than others to rub off. So this is what I end up with. And now this text. Now see how easy that is, cause it's soaked a while. So you get these three versions of what you can do it packing tape. Now your assignment is to do your own, so find some images you like and try this packing tape and we'll see you in the next section. 5. Gesso wash #1: Jessel Wash. By Doris Shoni. Welcome. What we're going to do now is take this abstracted piece of work and we're going to add in a bouquet of flowers just by adding a wash. So what I do is I use a chalk and then I draw the whole bouquet and I make sure that there's irregular patterns and lots of little dance, and it looks more less like a bouquet with at little leaves here, if you want. And what we're going to do is just paint Jessel around the edges so you just take it and follow the lines. This is an easy, just about brain free kind of exercise, and the result is beautiful. What you end up with is a very colorful bouquet that will look like you intended to have it that way. So this is step one. What we're going to do is actually isolate all the color and then go back in with some ink and at a few highlights, this is going to be really easy. It's a shame to take out some of that detail because some of the paintwork is just beautiful on coming up to a spot where I really don't want to take it out. But I will keep in mind that you have to make sacrifices sometimes for your art, and this really helps. And sometimes you have to take away something in order for your project to succeed. So here we're taking away the background. We're going to make the background very plain and half the background, a real contrast to the colorful foreground. Now this is easy to do. You can just batter paint. You can adjust, ad any kind of colors together and let them dry. And then you do this exercise. It's really finally, it's a great way to use up all those paintings that you didn't like or didn't succeed with . Just batter paint on top of them at a few blotches here and there and then tell Ah, you have this wonderful exercise and you'll see the end product is just outstanding. I'm just going to be very careful with the line. Mary does look, half have to look like a table, and then you even out your wash in the background. You don't want the brush parks to show to two months, and then you can add a few little marks in between just to show that there's a separation between the bouquet and the vials. So I'm just going to soften some of the edges like that. That's it. That's as complicated as it gets. Mm, I'm looking at it from the upside down. That's a trick I use sometimes to see if I missed any spots. So here ago, we're done here and we have to wait for it to draw. Now the peace has dried and we're going to Add Inc. This is a really fun part here. I'm taking off the masking tape and you can see even better how lovely that looks already. When you have that green, ugly marking tape, it's hard to tell. And now I'm going to add Inc. So I've speeded up the camera, so it's not so slow for you. But the idea is to add Inc just to emphasize a few lines and basically leave most of it just a color that you see right there just trying isolate a few little areas and make it look like there's a flower there. As you know this, I like to use a branch and with my ink, because it leaves irregular lines. I'm don't have a marker and look doesn't look like I used just one kind of marker, and it looks the same all over the place. Instead, what I have is an irregular line. I just isolate some of the edges. Absalom lines have a few petals here in there at flower centers, and it doesn't take long that I have a beautiful bouquet of flowers. This is a great exercise, and I love this. It's great for relaxing spattering a little bit as a little extra dynamic there and here I'm adding another flower. Remember that in most bouquets some of the flowers you see in great detail and some you don't. If you're not sure you can always buy. Okay, it's a good excuse to buy bouquet and just use that as a reference. I love buying flowers. That's something that I would do. So I'm adding a few touches, even on the ground level, and here it is the final product. No, it's that lovely, and that's just adding Jessel around a spattered image, and that's it. So have fun with up and we'll see you in the next section 6. Masking tape as a texture: adding textures with masking tape by Doris I. So here ago we're going to add some textures on top of this painting with masking tape so we can fold it. We can do all kinds of things to it. You're adding a texture so you can crumble it up and add it if you want. But in this case, I'm going to add just folded pieces to the painting. So I'm going to add it like this and then glue it on. Now I'm not going to put just one piece on. I'll put several and keep adding them. So as I fold him, I'm just careful not to get the tackiness off. Here we go. We're adding masking tape. Now. You have to have a reason to add masking tape textures. You want to create certain types of textures to create an effect. Just don't put it on because you feel like you should put it on. If it has a purpose. Not if it's something that you just want to try it out and you're just I don't know your loss for what to put on it. Add it with purpose. Sometimes people put textures on their paintings and it doesn't relate at all to what the painting is all about. So it's important for you to think about how to add the tape and why to add the tape. This is a texture that's quite what's the word strong so that people know this it right away. So if you're adding it, it's got to be for a good reason. I'm not going to add a another piece there, so I'm creating something like a focal point, and then you just paint on top of it just like that. So I'm just gonna paint on top and add a couple colors and let some of the background show someone. This isn't my favorite background, and I don't mind painting over it at all. I've speeded up the tape so I don't normally work this fast, but you're getting the idea off how to put it on and what it looks like after you've painted over it. And that's what I want to show you. The effect that causes it's very, very interesting, so just paint at it on and see what happens. Often. I put multiple colors on because the tape will catch the paint in a different way each time , and it creates some fairly interesting effects. So here I have the paint and you can see some of the paint, and it catches the pink in some parts, but not every part, so that every tape is different. So everywhere that I have put tape, it's come out a little differently because the tape catches it catches that surface a little differently, and my brush touches the paper differently when I'm working on is illustration born. So it's quite heavy duty and it's easy to work wet on wet. And now I'm going to just and a little bit of spatter and then let it all dry. And then you get to see what it looks like after I probably will put about 10 layers of color on here, sort of like this one. Here's a texture with masking tape, and the pieces have all been flattened out, but you can still see the texture and see all the colors I put on. Now there's a second way to add masking tape, and that's to use it as a masking agent. So you put the pieces of masking tape on, and then you paint over them and see what happens. So I'm gonna put a few somewhat jagged edges and somewhere cut address you get. See the different look and I'm going to Adam irregularly. I'm also going to add these commercial dots. I've never used them before, but this is a chance to see if they would work as a masking agent. So I'm gonna put a few down and see what happens and paint over them. Now, if there sometimes what happens with the masking tape is it actually becomes part of the peace because it won't come out, so we'll see what happens there. So I just paint over the masking tape pieces and I'm going to add it to the textured masking tape areas to and see what happens. See what the look is going to be like. This is one of many layers that I will add. And this is here to show you what it looks like when you add masking tape. This needs to dry now and then you add more pieces. Wait. I'm going pretty heavy on the white so we'll see what happens. He has that dry piece, so I'm going to take off the masking tape and see what happens. You see the color underneath, and I'm taking it off. So you end up with a mark and it's really related to mark making when you're using masking tape so you'll have street edges and jagged edges. I'm having a hard time taking it off there. These real commercial dots don't come off farewell, so I may not use them again. You see tiny, subtle Marksville. So this is it for masking tape. It's not very complicated. Enjoy, but make sure you use it wisely, so you in the next section. 7. Sand for texture: Sand by Doris Chevy. This is an exercise in adding texture, and I'm going to use the X composition, and I'm going to show you how to put on the sand. Now, this is not going to be a finished painting. I'm on Lee going to show you how toe add the sand and then add a few pointers for the X composition. That's it for this. I'm not going to finish the painting. So the first item you need is gel. So you just put gel wherever you want to send to be just like that. And make sure your generous with the gel a little bit of jail means not much. Sand will stick. And I'm changing up the composition a little bit there. What? I'm making sure there's enough gel. Now I have Black Sam simply because somebody gave me a big jar of black sand and I'm gonna use it this time. You can get sand in a lot of different colors. You could get orange, yellow, purple or even plain ordinary brown sand or like brown beige sand. Now all you do is put it on top of the gel and gently tap it like that and then let it dry . That's all there is to that. Once the sand is dry, you just tap it off and their ego. You have sand and here to your painting. If you want to add more sound because there's areas that didn't cover very well, just put more gel and more sand and let it dry again. It's not very complicated. And then you add the background here. I'm just showing you this light background and showing you what happens. Once you start adding the paint, see the little grains of sand in the background. Those will will stick to the acrylic, and it looks great. I love repeating that texture. It gives you the idea that the sand has spread and it repeats the idea that you actually used a texture. I like repeating that I'm just going to add a little bit of acrylic everywhere and show you how that works. Now keep in mind that the sand will come off. If there's not enough gel, you conduce this exercise on canvas on board on illustration board. This is watercolor paper. You have to be more careful with watercolor paper because when you bend the paper. The sand will have a tendency to come off. See the sand spread just gently on the top bar there. I just love that Now Here's a tip for the X composition. You have a very dark dark, and here you added a medium color, and now you're adding a medium dark. You want to vary the dark's and create an interesting background. So that's the tip for the X composition and the sand. See you in the next one. 8. Eggshells for texture: using and shells by Doris. Now, this is an easy one, and it's not even very hard. I have was given these eggshells by a teacher, and it was something that she used to use in her work. And she doesn't anymore. When I thought, Well, I'll try it. I'll see what it looks like and what it feels like. It adds great texture. So if you want something that's quite heavy relief, this is perfect. So I'm going toe add these two lines off eggshells. Now, if you're not given eggshells and you haven't washed him yet, so you take the eggshells and you crushed them washed, um, crushed them. And then if you want to have colored ones like these, you soak them in color, die so you can color these eggshells quite easily with die. But it won't matter for me. The I will paint over this texture. Just tap the egg shells a little bit so they sink into the jail. Once they're gels, they will be there forever, and they will not move. So the trick is to just crushed them enough so they stick to the jail and you can overlap them. Just take your time and at them. So just to review, if you're using your own eggshells, washed the egg shells in soapy water, then you can crush them and use them once they're dry. It's a very easy substance to use, an accessible for people, most that eat eggs most days. This is a really easy texture to create. You can use it any which way you like. Various one little hesitation about eggshells. It's used in a lot of crafts, so you want to make it so your paintings don't turn into a craft project. You really want it to just be a texture, and you may not want people to realize their eggshells. You may, but you may not either. So I'm just stick making sure they stick in the jail and create that wonderful texture once I have them in the gel, what I will do is I let the Jell Drive for 24 hours, and then I will gel again on top of those eggshells. I'm not going to show you that part that's too slow and too long. I'm sure you can remember it anyway, So that's all there is to adding the eggshells crushing them enough so that you can just stick him in the gel. Sometimes it's hard to get them to stick in the jail. But the second time around you'll do. It worked really well once they're on their there on there forever, and it adds great texture. As you'll see later, I'm going to paint over these with another color so that I have texture. That's a relief, but it's not eggshells in your face looking like eggshells. All it looks like is a texture. So that's it for now. Now, to your term triumph saved those eggshells, washed them, crushed him up. And we'll see you in the next section after you've tried this. See you soon. 9. Finishing a photocopy transfer: finishing a photocopy transfer by Doris Shiny. Now a lot of my students were requesting that I showed them how to finish a photocopy transfer. So here I have my photocopy transfer on a base that's mostly quinacrine on gold and a bit of yellow and a bit of green, and I'm going to add elements to it. I'm going to add collage, tense ling stamping Ah, lot of variety of things, and that's generally what I do. But before I start, usually what I do is I pick a composition. You can know more about composition by following my composition for abstracts course, and in one of those there's a composition called Strata or the X. And in this one I was trying to decide which one I like the most. And I think for this one, when I'm going to follow is the composition for the X. So what you need for that is an element that goes more or less up and down, and then you add some diagonal elements here. I'm collage ing some polka dot tissue paper. I'm making sure that it's on a diagonal, so most of the elements will be on the diagonal here, I can add some stamps. I have homemade stamps and I have bought stamps and I just pick. My daughter is a nature buff, and this is a photocopy her, So I'm adding some plant elements. My daughter is part of my dream. Siri's where I try to portray the dreams of youth, the energy, and that's what I love is the energy of youth and the dreams and the potential that thinking that everything is possible. And that's what I like to portray in my paintings where she's featured. So I tried to decide if there's going to be stripes that go up and down or diagonally. It's hard to decide sometimes, and you have to just try it out. The beauty of Kash is you can try it when you're doing acrylic painting. You put it on and then you'd have to wipe it off, and it's really hard sometimes to really wipe off everything. So here what I'm doing is I'm just placing the elements where I think they might go. And if I like the look of it, I just add it. I have to admit that this painting makes it look easy. Sometimes it takes me weeks to create a painting and other times it takes me just a few days, depending on how it goes for this one, I have to own up. You're seeing the speeded up version. But also it took me several weeks to put this video together. So deciding what will go where is a big job Because you want to make sure it looks good. The beauty of colossal is that you? If you don't like it, you can paint over it. The other beauty of collages. You can add pieces and blend them together with gel, and it looks like one big piece that you plan tohave there and you cut it perfectly. Whereas all you did is just collage a few pieces together. And it looks good the way they're so here. I'm going to add gel. Adding gel underneath and on top is very important. I talk more in my mixed media class on the importance of not having air bubbles. Air bubbles create a danger if you're painting rubs. Once it's drive against another painting, it might rub off some of the bubbles and then you want the paper will disappear. Just wear right off and you don't want that. You can collage more pieces on top and just make it look like it's blending. So this is a quick overview of what you learn in my mixed media class. You can get more detail if you take the full class. I'm adding things fairly quickly here and making choices. Sometimes the choices are hard to make. There will be times you'll need to let the pieces dry before continuing in this video. I'm just piecing all the different videos together, and the drying time has happened already. So remember, you can't do it in one sitting. So right now I'm going to add a stencil. My daughter's a traveler, so I'm adding stencil to commemorate that. At the same time, it's a design element, so I'm adding the mama. Papa baby sizes off the stencil, so small, medium and large pieces of stencil so that they blend together, and it also makes me think of the subject matter. And I repeat the purple everywhere, not everywhere, but in many places. Now I'm adding white because I want to highlight the figure. If you put white down and then dab it with paper towel you end up with a very interesting texture, and that's what I'm doing here. I'm just dabbing it and that gives you that model. Look. Now I'm adding photocopy transfers that I've added to tissue paper, and I'm adding those in and blending the man is your upside down for this part? I'm sorry about that. I forgot to move the clip around, and now this time I'm adding mark making. So I'm adding some of my favorite techniques. Mark making is ink that I draw onto the painting and I use my stick. I take a branch that I've altered, and I show you how to do that in my mix meter class, and I draw with it and I love the irregularity of the ink. So the market is never the same. All the times we have fat, skinny marks and it looks good. Now I'm adding white to the figure. I add white in the eyes to make it look more lively, and I add little white there to highlight it so that my eye goes all the way down to the bottom and starts a top and moves all the way down on the wait. So I'm repeating the white so that it is blended all over. The next step is adding stamps so that stamps at texture. But also I'm thinking about the figure and the personality, and my daughter is a writer. So there's a writer in the family, and it makes me think of her when I see the writing, the writing is a great stamp for adding texture. Keep in line that when you add texture, it's good to add it in different places. Here, I'm adding it in three different places, and I'm keeping to my model that I teach in my mixed media class. Mama, Papa, baby. Here I have small, medium and large pieces of text. Oh, there's a lot to do here, so I keep adding and seeing if I'm happy with the end product, I check that my eye is going around. The painting still and the textures air repeated enough. Sometimes I when I paint my texture, my paint onto the stamp, I don't quite get enough on, and I have to do it over again or put too much, and then I have to dab it off. Then what I do is I go around and take the white that's near the edges and smooth or adult him out. If I have white around, the edges will take away from my focal point, so I dull down the areas here. I'm using my favorite color quinacrine own goal, but you can use any color that you like. This gold blends really well with the purple. I also have part of the color wheel happening here. I have gold and purple and pinks, which work really well together. Purple and yellow are great combos, and then I add the black and the white and the pinks is an extra little touch. There's a lot to do here around the edges. Keep in mind that another composition tip where designed tip is trying to make sure that all four corners air different. If you keep your design elements irregular, it makes a more interesting painting, but it also stops people from going away from your painting. Do you think? Oh, this is quite interesting because it's different here. It is different there. Now. I'm adding highlights on the forehand and on the chin to show that there's light shining there, and then I'll keep reworking this painting sometimes for weeks and tweak it here, tweak it there until I'm happy with the end product. Sometimes it will. Even last months, I can work for months on the painting. The best thing to do is to put your painting in the place where you will see it when you walk by and then you can check, see if there's anything that needs to be added to it. So that's it for photocopy transfers. Check out my new mixed media class and we'll see you there. 10. Conclusion: conclusion. I really enjoyed making this class, and I hope you enjoyed taking it, too. We covered so many techniques that you can try. I would love it if you'd share some of your ideas and your projects that you did with us. I only have to do is send me an email or send the pictures of what you've done through the site. It would be really great for everybody to see what others are doing in this club. And I want to thank you for just being there. It's been a great course. Now I look forward to seeing you in my next course, see you for now and have fun creating.