Air painting

I’ve got another paint technique to share with you today – it’s a little bit Jackson Pollack, and very messy but I promise you you’ll have a bunch of fun trying it out!!

The secret ingredient for this technique is a can of compressed air – which you might be able to find in your husband’s tool shed if you’re lucky. My husband has them for cleaning out computer keyboards and the like, but otherwise you can buy them at any hardware store.

I’m using acrylic paints which I dilute with water so it’s nice and runny. But I’m sure water-paints would work just as well. Choose your first colour and dollop a generous amount on your page – make a good puddle!

Then spray away at it with your compressed air, driving it in the directions you want it to go. You might want to do some practice runs first so you have an idea of what might happen. And you definitely want to cover your work space (and everything around you!) if you don’t want everything splattered in paint….. a lesson I learnt well!

When you’re happy with your first colour set it aside to dry before repeating the same process with a second colour.

This is what my page looked like after three colour layers.

And then this is what it looked like when I had finished with five colours. You can also see I was too impatient to take a picture beforehand, or wait for it to dry before I started experimenting with my title placement!

Once everything had thoroughly dried I constructed the rest of my layout around it. I thought the messy background would be perfectly ironic for these photos of my daughter trying to clean up.  Everything on this page is from the August kit from Kreatorville Kraft, with the exception of the black alphas (from the April kit) and the chipboard stars (from the July kit)

To make the photo frames I stuck the packing tape onto a sheet of acetate – effectively making my own transparency. Then it was simply a matter of cutting them into rectangles to use behind my photos. I drew around the edge with a black Sharpie for some definition.

I really wanted to try out this technique that I’ve seen a couple of people do where they hang their title just slightly off the edge of the page and then cut off the excess. It’s still easily readable, but is just a bit quirky. I like quirky!

Well that’s it from me. I hope you’ll be able to give this fun (but very messy) technique a try!