Here’s a gouache portrait I painted on a pre-painted background.
Briefly, because I’ve discussed it before in depth:
Remember if you want to paint with wet media on a textured background you need to use water-resistant media for your background. (Or be happy that you’ll be fighting the pick up of the background as you paint your main subject. It can be a fun endeavor.)
To avoid picking up the background as you paint the main subject use water-resistant rubber stamp ink, acrylic inks, acrylic markers, acrylic paint (acrylic high-flow paints like Golden are very liquid if that’s what you like; heavy body tube paints will give you dimensional texture to paint over).
You can use collage material, but you want to check that any collage pieces with printing on them have water-resistant inks first. (And stick them down with glue that won’t be loosened with the wet media you next put down.)
Today’s image has a pretty dimensionally flat background created with thinned out acrylic paint. If I’d wanted raised texture on the page I could have added any of the acrylic mediums that give body (like modeling paste) to my paint. I didn’t want that at this time—but I do love doing that in paintings outside my journal.
I painted a bunch of pages in my journal all on one evening. Typically I paint off the edges of the pages. But on this evening I taped everything off. I thought I was making background layers for collage and I wanted them to float in a frame.
When I got to this page I felt like painting in gouache. (It’s a fairgoer from Earth’s World.)
I thought you might enjoy seeing the background without the painting on top, so here is an image of that. I still think it would have made a great background for collage, but we need to follow our instincts in the moment. (I think my moment for collage in April had passed by the time I got to this page.)
Someone always asks, so I’ll just mention—I ignore the background when I’m painting—or at least I did in this painting.
Looking at the texture I started with I see that while I had nothing in mind while painting the texture I did create a perfect shape for a dark figure with a little bit of light on the head and something light perhaps on the chest. But that’s not how I used the pre-painted background. I still do feel like doing a painting like that.
Listen to what your textures are telling you about what your subconscious wants to paint.
Make some background textures for yourself this weekend and paint on them next week. It will be fun.
Now I have to get back to a really long post I’m working on…we’ll be in touch.
