paint cut paste

we haven’t done a whole lot of printmaking and stamping lately, but when i saw this post on make. believe., i was re-inspired!

N and i collected hard, round surfaces from the kitchen on which to paint with acrylic paints. we came up with a few options. this is one of those activities for which i’m sure you already have all of the materials laying around your house. if not, improvise! (you can use pie pans, shoebox lids, paper plates for surfaces, and fingers or pencil erasers instead of q-tips.)

then we had fun mixing colors and covering the bottom of pie pans with a thick layer of acrylic paint using 1″ wide, flat paintbrushes. (sure, a brayer would have been nice, but somehow we don’t have one.)

next, we drew our designs onto the bottom of the pans, carving away the paint with cotton swabs (yes, q-tips. how well-marketed is that brand that their brand name is the common name we most often use? wow.)

then we pressed the bottoms onto different sizes of white paper.

next we tried using a paper plate (leftover from her january birthday party) to do the same.

 

we got similar results with the paper plate as the ones we got with pie pans. (my tip any of these surfaces is just to spread the paint on very thick, and make sure the q-tip really carves away the paint when drawing your design.)

"this one is a person with a bird flying above"

lastly, we got out a cupcake tin that we only use for art, and decided to paint each one a different color.

 

then N drew designs on each cupcake bottom. she picked simple things to draw like hearts, suns, moons, flowers, leaves, waves, spirals, etc.

we pressed the cupcake pan twice onto a large sheet of paper, and voila!

the designs came out looking abstract and charmingly weathered. i love how these prints turned out as beautiful mandalas!

Related posts:

1. paintblots
2. kandinsky’s circles
3. a rose by any other romaine
4. santa card
5. botanical paint