golden acrylic demo

attended a 2 hr demo by a bay area artist demo of golden products. did learn a few things, get some questions answered that artstore people (who were there) could not give me in the past. man this is a small town. did not know everyone, yet have seen all at various art functions about town.

liked/learned from the comparative examples of the various mediums/glazes

got a new idea:
i may use for 3 of my prints> after coating the bw kinko print with soft gel a bunch one can remove the paper & the pigment will remain. the example there was of a bw of one of her paintings & had not been painted on>>>sort of a xray quality to it. i like the transparency of it, yet would want to add transparent color i think. if nothing else one would be able to get rid of the crappy bond paper & gesso the back or adhere it to canvas, wc paper, or ? if the transparency remained one could backlight it, hang it, layer it. would need to buy their soft gel to do this.

not big on the texture gel stuff as i have messed a lot with creating my own in the past & can not see spending $$ for something i would not use often.

did like the crackle stuff, yet would prefer it was clear > more diverse application & conducive to mixmedia.

all the sparkly/metalic/irridecent/inference stuff is pretty, yet i shy away from it as an option in art>>>seems to have a fad/trendy stigma attached to it's use. great if i was painting rainbows & unicorns. may work as an underpainting, have tried some & kinda like the bronze, yet fought with it a bit. think i would rather paint on a sheet of metal or leaf if i were to go that route.

guess i just like dirt too much. have added burnt bone, ash, clays to gel medium years ago to use as paint when experimenting with organic type stuff. had a idea of being able to take a few things backpacking & then use whatever was around to create with.

years ago in a class i had an assignment to create something that:

• super cheap that could be constructed with assessable materials
• that was easy to make & fulfilled a need
  
• targeted a specific, marginalized group (3rd world)
• honored their culture somehow

what i did was to create a solar oven with a cardboard box & foil. polished metal works better than foil, yet cardboard/foil would enable more ovens to be made & thereby serve more people. i chose madagascar as my location/people. i studied & spoke with a girl that had lived there for a year in the peace core. i used the acrylic gel with ash, dirt & the like to paint patterns derived from historical fabrics of that area. i was able to create black, white, beige, raw sienna-ish, burnt sienna-ish & burnt umber-ish paint that was like the fabrics and probably attainable there. my limiting the need to only buy gel the cost was kept down. using the gel also strengthened/waterproofed the cardboard & repelled dirt/food. to some extent using the clay in the paint would retain heat a little. the downside to using the organic in the gel is controlling the grit size. a mortar & pestle would have been smart. i might use this assignment teaching one day. some of the students went solar or wind & had interesting results.