Art prompts to try out some textures!

[alias_sqbr]

I've been experimenting with making my own water colour textures and want to test out the ones I've made before making any more. So! Please have a look at my current experiments and give me art prompts you think would suit that colour scheme, or that the colours make you think of. Original or fannish, and don't worry too much about having to match the texture I'll be digitally messing with them.

The textures:


1: blue gradient on printer paper.
2: Blue-green gradient on water colour paper.
3: Same gradient with darker blue added.
4: Wet-on-wet yellow-orange swirls. I used cling wrap and paper towels to mess around with the texture.

I started with $1 Dora the Explorer water colours on printer paper. ODDLY ENOUGH THIS DID NOT TURN OUT WELL. Then I read some tutorials and visited the art store. All up the paints, paper and brushes cost me $40 and that was getting the cheapest stuff. This is why I like digital art.

Comments

[astridv]

Oh I like that last one. I can't think of a prompt right now but I'm imagining something with stark ink lines on transparent background could look good with that.

Watercolors are pretty expensive but they have the advantage they last long. So you have a large lump sum once, and then just have to replace a tube here or there. I think these days I spend most money on watercolor paper.

Brushes make a huge difference too. I now use real marten hair for watercolor and they're so great. At first you swallow at the expense but they last forever. You just have to make sure to never ever let them touch acrylic colors because that'll ruin them right away.

[sami]

I haven't found acrylics ruin my brushes, but it may be the specific acrylics I use; Windsor and Newton's, which are compounded differently from pretty much all the others. Also I wash them out *immediately*. (In part because the acrylics I use dry very quickly and I hate hate hate removing dried paint from brushes.) A cup of water when I'm painting to rinse them mostly out and keep them wet immediately I'm done with the paint, and a thorough wash with brush soap when I'm done painting.

I use a mix of expensive and cheap brushes, though. Like, my broad brushes for painting large areas and messing around with large textures are the cheapest brushes available, because then I can hideously abuse them without too much financial pain. (Having them in stock has turned out to be spectacularly useful especially when my housemate needed assistance with a project that ended up involving using brushes to paint with spray-paint paint, which, I have to tell you, was entirely terminal for the brushes involved.)

I also often like painting with watercolours over acrylic, because you can do interesting things with textures that you can't really do straight on paper.

[astridv]

Yeah, I use cheaper brushes for larger areas too. Large marten brushes are ridiculously expensive.

I haven't found acrylics ruin my brushes, but it may be the specific acrylics I use; Windsor and Newton's, which are compounded differently from pretty much all the others.

Huh, interesting. But the W&Ns aren't water-soluble, are they?

[sami]

They are when still wet? I'm not sure I'd use water as a medium for them, necessarily. I think you *can* but I prefer a slicker texture even if I'm just going for a sort of glaze level of colour.

I once painted a wood texture that was so good my father made a sarcastic sort of comment praising the wood texture... because he thought the painting was painted *on wood* and the wood was just original and natural.

I'd applied the texture itself using pretty much straight-from-the-tube titanium white, and then a rather dilute brown washed over it so that the texture underneath collected more or less for darker/lighter patterning, and... yeah, it looks like wood. The slightly thicker-than-water medium works better for that kind of thing, I think.

But if you put a brush covered in W&N acrylic in a cup of water and shake it around, most of the paint does come off into the water.