Art journal prompt: Texture

The Day 6 creative prompt was Texture. The only direction I gave myself for this one was to use crushed up brown leaves from the yard, adhered to the grey journal page with acrylic medium.

With those pieces in place along with some tissue paper layers, I scraped on thick gesso and scratched some texture into that. It needed a bit of color so I dabbed in some lemon yellow gouache mixed with gesso, and smooshed in a bit of black acrylic paint for contrast. A water soluble pencil scratched some more texture and tone into the surface. I love the lemon yellow with the low intensity of grey and brown.

Layers of leaves, tissue paper, acrylic medium, gesso, and paint

I wanted to do this all in one sitting, and the textured layers made this difficult. I wasn’t going for anything specific, but didn’t want to lose all sense of definition and just end up with a pile of mud. I think to work like this again I’d prefer to do a texture layer, let it dry, then go back in with paints and mark making. An overnight drying period would be good.