19 Jun 09 Ever Wanted To Make A Mosaic?…
Mosaics today are used in so many different ways, both in the home and in garden designs and outdoor projects. In other words, they are back in fashion even though they date back to Roman times.
Do I need many tools for this? Well, you will need your subject to decorate, PVA or a water soluble glue, grout, mosaic tiles, brown paper, sponge, squeegee, pencil, chalk, goggles, face mask, nippers or a hammer and hardie.
What other items can be used? The answer to that is plenty really! You can paint your own tiling with porcelain paint or, as an example, how about trying anything from the following list. Marbles, shells, glass nuggets or even beads, mosaic tiles, pebbles off the beach, mirrored glass, or even old crocks, if you smash them up!
The tiles themselves come complete with a brown paper backing. So, how do you get this off? Quite simply really! Soak them in warm water, continue by giving the tiles a rinsing and just let them dry. With the indirect method you can use the tiles straight from the paper.
Use a sheet of brown paper for this by gluing your tiles into place upside down with an adhesive which is water soluble. If you do this, you will maintain a good smooth surface.
You then need to prepare your item with a tile cement that is quick drying and then put your tiles on to the wet cement. Leave the brown paper on at this stage. Once it has dried, all you need to do, is to soak the paper with a wet sponge to remove it.
This is basically the same principal you employ when tiling a bathroom or kitchen. But you will need all your little cracks filled in. It is easy to use your squeegee for this. Use a wet sponge to clean up all grouting. Once it is dry, continue and finish the surface and polish it up.
Now for your designs. When you first start, it is often easier to do something like geometric patterning. With more experience you can move on to designs with circles and curving’s etc. The tiles may need shaping to fit your design, so for this you need the direct method. This can be achieved in two ways.
An old fashioned way first, but do not attempt this until you have had a practice run. Hardie held over the tile. Use your hammer and tap the hardie, which then cuts away at the tile and, in fact, moves it into whatever shape you are aiming for.
Or you could use nippers, which is by far the easiest method. This lets you cut tiles in to quarters and halves by nibbling away, as it were, to give you curves or whatever you may need. Practice with some spare tiles first, until you are satisfied with the result. It doesn’t really matter if you have some weird shapes, you should be able to incorporate them into your design.
You could prepare your tiles in a clear plastic bag to keep any glass shards or dust safely in the bag. Always make sure that you do wear a face mask and goggles while you work for safety reasons and do be sure to hoover round afterwards or get the dustpan and brush out. Have fun!
Tags: art, artists, arts, contemporary artist, crafts, Family, paintings, recreations, visual arts
18 Jun 09 Colours And The Colour Wheel!…
A colour wheel consists of two halves. One side has the warm colours, which seem to come forward, namely red, orange and yellow. In the other half of this wheel you have the colours which create a coolness about them, blue, violet and green, and these seem to retract.
You could use this to advantage if you were doing a landsape painting. If you used blue and green for trees at the back, it would make them look distant and far away. When you use colors that are opposites in the circle they are called complementary colours.
This can be used to great effect to create strong colouring which is vibrant and a good contrast to your pictures.
Bear in mind that light is the main way we perceive colour all about us. To a lot of people red is red, blue is blue etc., but it does not stop there, you only need to look at the sea or the skies to decide upon that.
Or look at the ocean with differing shades of blues, greens ect. How we see these in our minds eye, is down to the light.
If the sun passes through raindrops the spectrum appears. Looking at these colours, if you make a ring with these, you have a colour wheel. Which brings us to colour mixing!
The primary colours and also the, what we call pure colours, are red, yellow and blue. Note these shades cannot be made up from any other colours. Orange, green and violet are the secondary colours, with these are made from a 50/50 ratio of the two primary colour neighbours in the circle.
This can now be extended by joining any of the main primary colours, with whichever you may choose, from the secondary colours. Try mixing blue and green and you come up with turquoise. Interestingly enough, the majority of paints you buy are named after flowers and gems.
You may have noticed that there is no black or white in the circle. As if the light beams on to something it will swallow up some of its wavelengths and then white will rebound to make up the colour that we see.
With the colour black it soaks them all up and white bounces them all back. Therefore black is a missing colour and white is all the colours made into one.
If you take brown as an example. Mix the primaries together and see how many shades you get.
Colour quite obviously plays a very important part for artists. It is amazing, you can create atmosphere, emotions, excite, present illusions of realism and even control space. They can also be transparent, opaque, translucent, textured, flat, matt, gloss, dull or vibrant.
Tags: art, artists, arts, contemporary artist, crafts, Family, paintings, recreations, visual arts
18 Jun 09 Are You A Novice At Candlemaking? Then This Is For You!…
Candle making is pretty easy to do on the whole. I am only surprised that more folks don’t experiment with this bearing in mind that candles are such a accepted item. Not simply do they generate a feeling of warmth and release perhaps healing powers as we find them restful, but they also give us soft and informal atmospheres to slow down by.
What is more, you need very few items to make them with. At the outset you will need several moulds, these are mostly to be found in rubber or else plastic, but they need to be flexible. Plus 3 or 4 assorted wicks in varying sizes and some colour. There is by and large quite a collection of colours, as a result you can, indeed, blend them.
Subsequently there is the wax/stearin itself, and you would certainly love some nice scents to harmonize with the candles. Accordingly, first grab your moulds and take care that they are perfectly clean inside and not harbouring dust.
A few moulds include a wick gap, as a result you will need to prepare a teeny cut to string the wick through. The thinner wicks to be used in favor of the smaller moulds as well as vice versa.Generally you want to cut the wick in any case 2 inches longer than your mould. Place the wick all through the mould, tying a knot inside the wick on top of the actual outside of your mould.
Then pull this out roughly half an inch, this part is wished-for to ignite it by. Compress some blue tack around the hole on the mould outside, otherwise your wax is liable to spill out. Straight away, at the bottom of the mould, secure the other edge of the wick to a cocktail stick plus set this across your mould bottom.
Clearly the wick has to remain central and secure, but do not attempt to stretch it. How much wax do I think you will need? If you fill your mould with water before you start this will act as a guide, however take into account this is the melted wax I am talking in relation to.
Now you will need a couple of interlocking saucepans, so that one will fit in the other. Take a support and set a quantity of warm water underneath the larger pot. The wax goes inside your small pan. Set the small saucepan within the bigger one and promptly set it on a low heat (temperature). If you are not sure how much wax to use try about 500g.
Watch the wax in addition to the water level carefully. Don’t let it get too hot! Once this has melted add the stearin. Add one tenth stearin to ten parts wax. Put your colour in a little at a time from the colour strips, you will not need much. After that add some fragrance, pot pourri, or else essential oils.
The mould needs to be vaguely lukewarm. Transfer the wax into a measuring jug, because this makes it easier to in that case fill your mould. Try and hang on to the mould on a skew at the same time as you execute this. Additionally, endeavor to pour the wax in so that it practically touches the cocktail stick. You will probably have to fill in all-around the bottom as soon as it has cooled down.
After it has set hard, take off the mould sealant. Cut the knot off the wick as near to the knot as possible, then remove the toothpick from the foot. Straight away extract your candle. If this is awkward, run the warm water tap over it for a few moments.
At this point cut the wick to however long you in reality would like it. Check the foot of the candle is smooth and give it at any rate a day. It ought to then be prepared for use. But you have managed this effectively you will doubtless gather as much satisfaction from it in the same way as if you were creating, say abstract paintings, or else even realism artwork.
Tags: art, artists, arts, crafts, Family, hobbies, paintings, recreations, visual arts
14 May 09 Let Me Offer You Some Further Tips On Glass Painting!
In my preceding article I mentioned that you can put on glass paint by means of a sponge, which in reality is a good method of perhaps covering, say, a large area. Not merely this, but it would allow you to merge in colours even as they are still wet, in fact. Plus, if you do this, you will, once this is dry, be able to rework it with the sponge with another colour.
So how about using a glass gel? Glass gel you can buy in your local art suppliers. This gel is currently available in tubes. How do you apply this? The best method is by means of a spatula! If you do this you will realize that it gives you a textured surface, but will as well provide relief effects.
All in all there are three types of gel colours, you have semi opaque, which are opaline, glittery are iridescent, and transparent which are crystalline. The fine thing on the subject of these is that you can mingle all the colours and ranges together, plus the outliners, copying the Tiffany type of glass really.
Consequently if you use the gel, and actually use a sponge to apply it, this will result in a more even type of thinner coat. You can therefore build further layers on this. A great plus you get when working with the gel is that it has a water base, so any tools you use can be washed and cleaned quite easily with soap and water.
You will what’s more see that it will no longer be all tacky after roughly half an hour plus most likely it will be totally dry in around a week. Actually, you may well say, that in general, the gel is to a certain extent slow to dry.
On the other hand, because of this self-same fact, it does present you the choice of being able to supplement different things into the gel itself to compliment your handiwork. As a result you may say what for example? Let us experiment with, just for starters, sequins, shapes in acetate, glass nuggets or even a small amount of sea shells. It is to a certain extent possible to attach your objects with one of your glass outliners.
Now all this sounds quite straightforward but, if I want to transfer my design to the glass, what is the best method to do this? I have to say that it is to a large extent easier to work on a level surface, particularly if you would like to paint, for instance, a window. I would endeavour to try and rest it on a surface horizontally. But if you were working on a sheet of acetate, or even a clip frame, you may well copy your pattern straight through.
More challenging perhaps is trying to move a design on to an object which is curved. In this state of affairs you would need to make use of some carbon paper and so therefore tape your paper to the glass. Carry on then by taping your pattern on top of this. After that you can basically draw on your motif with a biro to transport your outline on top of to the glass.
Similar to most forms of painting, ranging from abstract paintings all the way through to canvas art, it is wise to glaze it in order to look after it. Varnish for glass is sold either in a not shiny or surface shine finish. Matt finish leaves like a frosted glass appearance to it. If you utilize the gloss varnish you can additionally create paler shades by furthermore using it to thin out your paint, although it will not change the depth of colour or transparency.
Tags: art, artists, arts, crafts, Family, hobbies, paintings, recreations, visual arts
