The Evolution of Genea's OM

Hello beautiful souls,

Well I had a blast with the crackle paste this round! I learned some awesome things too so I am excited to share those things as well. So let's dive in! I like to start out with a 4x6" watercolor piece to try out the design and then go bigger. So for my first piece I rocked the chakra, pocket chakra and pocket chakra 2 stencils.

As you can see the crackle starts out white, but that's boring, right? So why not get down and dirty with some colors?

So here are some helpful tips I learned while working with this super sweet medium. On the website it suggests that you use matte medium to help the crackle stick to your piece better, but if you forget to do that when you start you kinda have to go backwards. Luckily you can still do that after you put your paste down. So you want to let the crackle paste dry. DON'T try to speed up the crackle with a dryer or you will not allow the medium to crackle on it's own. If you want big cracks you want a nice thick layer. Thinner layers will create thinner cracks, but be careful. The thinner the layer the flakier the little crackles, and when you put the matte medium on top you will lose it on your brush. The crackle doesn't really like to let all colorful things stick like watercolors so you need to get creative. On my heart sanskrit piece I used alcohol inks and the liquid solution to thin down and blend the color. I just squirted them right from the bottle on my piece and let them drip. When I was creating both pieces of artwork I flipped between both while I learned how to use them.

So let's take a look at my Om piece using the 12x12 Om crown stencil. I got my background nice and poppin' with some super bright colors, layers, black, white, drips, inks, and watercolors. I laid my Om on the top with the crackle paste and got to work.

It was pretty with just the white. You can actually see the distress inks penetrate the surface and bleed through, but they were a little too subtle. I started out with some opaque inks, but the crackle was so delicate before I learned the matte medium trick.

So I did the inks and then did the matte medium. This is not a water based ink so I didn't have any of the ink come up on my brush when I painted on the protective layer. So you want to keep that in mind as you do your matte medium layer. You can see the places where I lost some crackle, but it looks distressed and goes awesome with my piece. I was kinda digging the kind of tie-dye easter egg look, but it was pretty pastel.

I decided to get down with some alcohol inks and distress inks to really make the crackle pop, but then things got to be a little too much, and I was losing those awesome layers I had build up.

I got a little stuck so I posted on Facebook and asked friends to help make some suggestions. I got things like outline in white, black, dark blue, and some greens. I had already tried to outline in white but it still wasn't  enough to help. I decided to go for metallic gold so I  covered the Om in white ink and then got out the dylusions ground coffee spray, some other sparkle sprays, and I finished off the look with Viva Decor Inka Gold. I deiced I want to to clean up the outline so I addedd a paint pen in metallic gold as well and the constrast was pefect. I LOVE how well this piece turned out especially after the mess I started out with Lol.

What awesome saves have you done with your work when you got stuck in a design rut?

Until next time...

Love, light, and creativity,

xo Genea

Also in News