In the two workshops I am participating in this year – Paper Transformed by Julia Andrus and Celebrate Your Creative Self by Mary Todd Beam – have some wonderful projects for the month of February.  Unfortunately, February is a very short month and very busy so I spent a day doing some paper transformation.

All of the colors in this are done on white cardstock.  The colors are watercolors that are manipulated.

I set up six half sheets of card stock on my art board.  I used masking tape to keep them from curling from the moisture associated with watercolors.  Each piece or part of a piece of cardstock has a different technique used on it.  Most, actually all but one, are from Paper Transformed.  The wax resist is from Celebrate Your Creative Self.

This particular technique involves putting Pearl Ex mica powder in the watercolor as I painted the cardstock.  I used a mahogany color watercolor and a antique gold Pearl Ex. The picture does not do the coloring justice.  It is much more gold looking than here.

Above are what will become two different plastic wrap altered watercolors.  Neither left the amount of design in the paint that I thought it would but I do like this technique and will continue with larger and smaller, tighter squeezed together and looser plastic wrap until I get what I am looking for the watercolor to look like once dried.  The finished products are below.

Another wonderful technique was the basic watercolor wash.

Next up was salt.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I have two containers of sea salt – coarse for making bath salts and reminding me of the rock salt I put on the driveway here in upstate NY during winter.  I figured this was what I was going to use.  I guess I should have thought about it more so in the second art board full of techniques I used both the sea salt and table salt.

The first two of these have the coarse sea salt on them.  The right end has the table salt on it.  The results are below.

Another technique that I fell in love with was the watercolor with watercolor pencil shavings in the wet watercolor.  I did this with deep green pencil shavings in a yellow watercolor.

Finally, I utilized a wax resist from Celebrate Your Creative Self.  I have tried a wax resist before, using the wax from a dripping candle for wax and ironing off the was when done, and not been happy with the results.  I am not sure I liked the results this time either but below are two examples, one with a yellow crayon and one with a white crayon.

I am going to keep trying the wax resist.  I also still need to try the water removal of paint to reveal white space.  If it doesn’t get tried in the next week, it probably won’t as I have a big event coming up March 1 and need to work on that for a bit.