Paint in Collage

Collage lends it self to watermedia. You can use acrylic mediums as adhesive and add acrylic, water based crayon, pencil and about any drawing media.

Watercolor works, but tends to run when you add acrylic medium. There is an easy solution I discovered. Just spray a light coat of acrylic, such as Krylon Crystal Clear Acrylic Coating, #T303. This allows you to use all the neat watercolor effects such as salt or recycle failed watercolor paintings.

I like Golden paint and mediums. The Liquitex Basics paint are inexpensive and fine if you avoid the hues. In general, you should avoid hue colors in general, as they tend not mix as consistently as the real pigment.

While I'm not a traditional painter, when I do paint representational acrylic paintings, I prefer a very limited palette. For example, I prefer to mix my greens. For mixed media work, convenience colors are, well convenient! When you are painting a large surface area, such as a background, it's nice to have a pigment out of the jar. Especially if you need to retouch an area.

A common flaw with mixed media work is lack of color harmony. Like design, simplier usually works better. Try a neutral background of gray or titan buff. If you use color, make one color dominate with touches of complimentary color.

Recently I have been using a split primary pallette. This allows me to mix a range of harmonious, bright colors. I use white gesso and black gesso with the colors to get tints and shades. The pairs are:

Pyrrole Red Light & Hansa Yellow Medium has an orange bias and mix a wonderful and harmonious red, orange and yellow.
Quinacridone Magenta & Ultramarine Blue has a violet bias. Quinacridone Magenta and black is a wonderful eggplant color.
Hansa Yellow Light & Phthalo Blue Green Shade has a green bias. Allows a bright and tropical green mix.

Painting Links

www.handprint.com - The most complete color info anywhere! It is based on watercolor, but is useful for acrylic or any media. It's truly a book on-line!

The Bruce MacEvoy color wheel from the above web site, is the best I've ever seen! Download and print the .PDF file on your color printer.