Colorful Fun with Acrylic Craft Paint… Reclaiming your creativity doesn’t need to cost a lot
Welcome to Better With Art. I’m Melinda and I’m here to encourage you to reclaim your creativity and establish a healthy habit of creative self-care with one small-art prompt each week that can be done in an art journal or on paper if you don’t have one. If you’d like one, my recommendation is at the bottom of this post.
You may this week have seen on Instagram or Facebook a little heart project I did as a Happy Valentine to all of you. I hadn’t pulled paint, for a lack of a better term (I figure there must be one), in a while and it was a fun little change I thought it would be a good project for us this week.
If you were around for the 52-Week Art Journal Journey you may have made cats with me. They’re a fun little project to do with acrylic craft paint. Its consistency makes it ideal for this project. And if you’ve been around a while, you know that I like to use inexpensive and easy to access materials for my prompt videos, because reclaiming your creativity doesn’t need to cost a lot of money.
You’ll also need a credit card type plastic card. Mine’s an old Subway card.
Easy cat silhouettes
For the cats I used two cat-like colors: gray and orange. I started with the gray, the lighter color. You basically make a line that has a section on both ends that goes up at an angle. Like the silhouette of the top of a cat’s head, but from the point of each ear in… if that makes sense. The video will help with that. But, as isn’t uncommon, I’m a little clumsy. And that’s okay. It’s my art journal. And, what’s the refrain? Our art journals are a safe place to experiment (and express ourselves) without fear of what others will think. I put mine out there on YouTube and social media and, well, I’m sure that some people question my talent, but it’s my art journal. And yours is as private as you want it to be.
Make sure the top of your cat’s head is narrower than your card, then use the edge of the card to pull the paint down from your line to the bottom of your page.
Last year, I did lots of different colors of cats. There were pastel cats and deep-colored cats. And because doing this, dragging the paint like this, creates a translucent effect, I also overlapped some cats for an interesting effect. Just be sure to let the ones that will overlap dry at least a little bit. The pulled paint dries relatively quickly on the spots that it has been fully spread out and hasn’t puddled or pooled. That’s convenient.
I thought this year, it would be fun to try a rainbow. I’ve played around with different abstract paint pulls. And I encourage you to play around and see what you can come up with. Lay down dots and dashes and small lines of paint, and pull them across, down, or around your paper.
Masking tape is great to create neat edges, and also for placing paint when you want a shape or color to start at an edge.
You can use paint left on your card to pull as fun design on an opposite blank page, or keep laying down more color on the same page.
As I always say, HAVE FUN. Let yourself get absorbed in the process. Don’t worry about the product. This type of project will always have a level of unpredictability. And that’s great. Get curious. And get creative. Experiment.
When we take time to do things like this, we don’t just give ourselves the opportunity to enjoy ourselves and practice creative self-care, we also LEARN. Taking time to make art is not a waste of time.
Take some time to play
We are wired for creativity. Made in the Image of the Creator. Physical art isn’t for everyone. But when we’re not exercising our creativity in ways that are meaningful to us and that we enjoy we can’t be as healthy as we would be otherwise.
I gave up art-making for years. I knew what a difference making art had on my mental health, yet I still believed that there were other things that were more important. I don’t know that there’s much more important than our mental health, but… yeah…
I have been so much healthier since reclaiming my creativity and choosing to make art a regular practice.
You may have heard me say that it was a result of #The100DayProject in 2022 when I made my first art journal. Despite not even really knowing what an art journal is. But. One thing about art journals is there are no rules. So it was all good.
And out of my experience with #The100DayProject and #My100DayArtJournal in 2022. I started the 52-Week Art Journal Journey, and now Better With Art because I need to share with others what I have found.
For those of us who need to make art, well, we need to make art.
How I gave myself permission to establish an art-making practice
I needed a reason. I needed a way to give myself permission to take the time. And for me that year it was #The100DayProject.
And I hope that throughout the 52-Week Art Journal Journey I have encouraged others to make that choice. That very healthy choice to make art regularly. And that’s why I continued with Better With Art. Because we are better with art.
And if you’re reading this the day this prompt goes live, it’s February 18. The first day of #The100DayProject2024. I’ve decided to participate again. Each day for 100 days I’ll be sharing a different type of collage paper that I’m making. And at the end I will invite anyone who would like to come along with me to learn to get more comfortable with intuitive collage-making to make collage with me.
I really enjoyed making this week’s video, and having another one go beautifully differently. I love the two-page spread of paint play. And I hope you enjoy having your own fun.
I’ll be back next week with another prompt.
For more creative self-care inspiration, click here to follow Better With Art on Instagram.
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