Today's ATC is part of an experiment I did in my laboratory, lol.
You won't believe the ingredients I used.
Mattboard, Tile adhesive, smoothed with a spatula, pigment solution (like liquid watercolour) and diluted gold acrylic dropped with a dropper while the tile adhesve was still damp, glitter, distress ink, rub on word, white gel pen.
The white gel pen was an afterthought, when the rub on 'R' didn't adhere properly, so I made it into a feature instead!
The other day, I finally got around to doing some experimentation with making PVA/white glue crackle (only because I had a project I needed to finished, which also needed it!) I had watched lots of videos and looked at lots of blogs and decided to just to do it.
This is one of my altered books, which I often use to try out new ideas in. I have painted both sides of a spread with blue acrylic paint (You might recognise that there are two ATCs included in the photo and one of these - the dud, became the fishy business ATC)
I treated the two pages separately. Here I have covered the left one with a thick layer of PVA. I didn't wait wery long before the next step, no more than five minutes and it was still wet.
I forgot to photograph this step, but on the top half of the page, I used watered down lumiere gold and on the bottom watered down white acrylic. I used my heat gun to hasten the process a bit, but if you hold it too long or too close, the PVA will bubble and this is not really what we want.
The lumiere did not crack at all in this experiment, but what I did here was brush over the dry surface and move some of the top skin of dried paint around. It made an interesting textural effect. Perhaps I just didn't wait long enough, but even now, days later after the page has been turned and flexed, there are no cracks.
The watered down white acrylic, however made gorgeous cracks!
On the right hand page, instead of PVA, I used Paste. In Australia, we call it Clag, but it's really just a cooked cornflour paste, like we used as kids. I often make my own, but had a jar on the shelf which had been given to me, so used that. I thought this would work well, and still think I can make it work, because when this stuff dries, it tends to crack anyway. I used the Lumiere, which was probably a bad move - so two wrongs don't make a right in this case.
Here are the two ATC backgrounds. The one on the left is the same as the blue and white sample - neat PVA and watered down acrylic, and it cracked really well. In the one on the right (which became this
ATC), used watered down PVA and this just did not work. You need lots of gooey stuff, so when It dries it will cause the cracking.
Being an artist is a process of continually making something out of nothing.
(me)
No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from
the shock of our experiences - so-called trauma - but we make out of
them just what suits our purposes.
Alfred Adler
