pushing past

Daily Creative Prompt ~ October 17: PATTERN

I started out this morning a little concerned about where this was all going.

Have you been there? That place where you are absolutely sure you are the least creative person on the planet? We all have had those moments.

…and today’s prompt isn’t really helping.

I love the colorful brush from yesterday. Truly it was the most fun I have had in a long time, but now what?

Lacking any real inspiration, I dawdled about the house organizing, playing with the dogs, answering emails… in other words – procrastinating. Patterns can make a bland page really pop, create visual interest and impart an energy in your art that it may be otherwise lacking.

But what do you do when “pop” isn’t your issue?

How do you use pattern in a way that won’t make your brain speed into overdrive just by looking at it?

PATTERN can also be used to calm, to connect, and to soothe the speeding heart of yourproject if used correctly. Here are a few ideas:

• Too much color? Stamp 1 image all over your page with black ink or paint
• Stick circles all over your page (use circle stickers or cut them yourself from tape), then paint over the whole page with 1 color or coat in gesso. After you lift the tape back off, you will be left with a circular pattern of whatever was down there originally
• Stack some solid papers and cut them into square and rectangles. Glue them in an alternating pattern of color and shape around the edge of your page. If your page was originally very colorful, use black and gray or white to cut your pieces

This is how I approached today’s prompt:

Since my brush is on the smaller side, I figured at some point I was going to need to attach to something, or hang it. Looking through my closet, I found some left over cradled board from a past workshop. It is only an 8×8 piece, but I think it will work out just fine as a new substrate for this project.

I also gathered a smaller scrap piece of wood, some craft foam, scissors, pen and a glue stick.

 

 

Since the craft foam was the same size as my scrap wood, I placed it on top and drew some leaves filling the page.  I created simple patterns in those leaves then cut them from the foam, gluing them back down on the wood in the order they were on the foam.

 

 

Using a stylus, I “drew” over the detail lines in the leaves (wait for the glue to dry completely before you do this ;). The indentations that are created in this step will give detail to the image when stamped.

 

 

 

 

With a brayer, I rolled out a thin layer of black fluid acrylics with just a bit of blue acrylic inks, then rolled out the new foam stamp I created. You have to be careful not to get too much paint on the foam or all of your details will go bye-bye.

Using a stamp pad will solve this problem for the most part, but I like the texture of the paint. If you are unsure about whether you have too much or not, test it out on another piece of paper before you use it on your project.

When I was happy with how it was printing, I went ahead and stamped the whole surface of the new substrate.

Some of the stamped images didn’t turn out exactly as I had hoped, but that is how stamping usually rolls for me. Even though the leaves are all different, the fact that I stamped the same thing over and again as well as using black paint  made a huge difference in unifying and calming yesterday’s prompt. It still has a bit of crazy going on, but there are still 3 more prompts to go….

till tomorrow…happy creating!

~lisa

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Are you creating with these prompts?

I would love to see them! Post them on Instagram with the tag #CP4aCL, #creativefaith, #52projects, #lisaellen_art