This week’s Technique Tuesday is an additive. I’m combining TT with the Cult of Stuff workshop on AJ ning. My choice of stuff to experiment with was Golden’s Tar Gel. It’s an additive that you mix with a liquid paint to get stringy lines that stay raised, think of Jackson Pollock, and you have the right idea.

I’d read that Tar Gel takes forever to dry, I don’t like my art journal to be out of commission for that long, so I grabbed a board and did one of my automatic continuous line drawings on it in sharpie. I’d had paper and thread glued to this board previously so there is a lumpy bumpy texture already in place.

I filed in the face portion of the drawing first with warm colors then added a flat dark blue background. To this I added the strings, bloops, blobs, drips, drizzles and splots. I mixed a good amount of color with the medum, so that it was thin and runny. I then loaded up my palette knife and dribbled away. It was fun to try and control the medium, as it really had a mind of its own. Sometimes large blobs would run off the knife, sometimes thin streams.

The interesting thing with this medium is that the drips and dribbles stay raised. I tried the heat gun on them but it raised air bubbles and the medium did not seem to like it at all. So I’ve put a fan on it to attempt to dry it faster. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll be dry enough that I can hang it and get some decent pictures.

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