texture Archives - Maria Greene @ Greeneearth

Old art feels new again if enough time goes by. Some art doesn’t, and those canvases can be painted over with newer impressions, but sometimes I pull out an old painting and pause. If it touches my heart, it’s still good. It was created in 2007.

That’s how universal art is created. It has a timeless quality.

Mind you, everything is in the eye of the beholder and I’m of course partial to my own art.

I’m amazed how many styles I have tested over the years, from Americana folk art, to abstracts, to all sorts of mixed media, and now mostly intuitive art, which is really abstract if you want to be picky. Though sometimes weird figures abound.

Here are some pictures of my 2007 painting, Magic Happens:

Creating texture is easier than you think. Here is a picture tutorial I made using only paint to make some texture for the background on this art journal page.

I used these tools:

Paint, an old credit card, hair pick, wall texture dodad, nib of a pencil, baby wipes or tissues.

This is the end result.

This is how I made it:

I had no plan for this page other than creating texture. First, I took some unbleached white and spread it liberally on the page. I used the edge of a credit card to make some grooves in the paint.Then I used a pencil to dig more marks into the paint.

After that I used a hair pick to get some thinner grooves.

On top of that I used a dodad from the paint store and made some wider grooves. You need to wet the paint to make it pliable.

After that I used the corner of the credit card to slice some smaller grooves sideways over the others.

Now I let it dry, and then I chose a green paint to rub over part of the surface with a tissue.

As you can see, it’s kind of messy and the green covers more the top than the bottoms of the grooves. I took some dark umber on a stiff brush to dig the paint down into the grooves.

Now you can see the grooves well, so the rule is, use dark colors to enhance the grooves if they are important to the project.

Then I decided to add some red paint, which I smeared around with a tissue.

The grooves at the top of the page are not as deep, but it makes for a good contrast. (The white spots is sunlight through the blinds in the window.)

Close up of all the grooves when the paint was laid down. I did add some red paint to the depth of the grooves.

To soften the effect I added more of the original unbleached white over the other colors. Applied carefully so it wouldn’t get into the grooves.

Then I saw a face and decided to enhance that with markers and more paint.

The black marker was pretty harsh so I softened that a bit. I also used a Crayola brown to draw the contours. I softened the effect with my fingertip.