On a tangent: Art journal page using Gelatos! and a tutorial

Hi everyone :)

When I went to Creative Adventure Downunder a couple of months ago I was introduced to Faber Castell Gelatos by Donna Downey. We didn’t actually do much with them and I didn’t think too much more of them until a few weeks ago when I came across Debra Buckland’s blog… and oh my, all of a sudden I was thinking that I simply HAD to have some of my own to ‘play’ with!

You might be wondering what Gelatos actually are so here’s a very brief description:

Gelatos®

Nothing on the market today compares with Design Memory Craft Gelatos®. Compact acid-free pigment sticks glide on creamy smooth for vibrant colour and coverage. All Gelatos® blend easily with or without water.

They come in packs:

And a large set (which is what I bought)

I did a bit of Google searching and couldn’t find anyone in NZ who sold Gelatos… and of course I couldn’t let it go at that so I contacted Debra through her blog and got some info from her. She’s set up a Facebook group for anyone interesting in using/buying/sharing techniques for Gelatos and it’s GREAT! If you’re at all interested in getting Gelatos or learning how to use them then we’d love to see you join the group.

To cut a long story short… I ordered my Gelatos and they arrived on Friday while I was at school. I was desperate to ‘play’ but I promised myself that I’d get all my maths books marked and up to date before I used them… and this morning I got up early and finished the last 6 books and I’ve been ‘playing’ ever since!

So here’s what I’ve come up with:

I’m super happy with it… and totally loving Gelatos! So many possibilities for using them. I’ve had some really wonderful comments about my tutorials so I’ve done the step-by-step photos to go with this page.

I started off with a background that I’d made ages ago… in fact I think it might be one of the ones I made while I was staying at Krystal’s. The poppy flowers were made using a Donna Downey cutting file from the Silhouette along with some texture paste. The whole page had already been painted with gesso so I was able to start straight away!

I have to admit that I didn’t even do a ‘test run’ on the colours… I just put them straight onto my page… must have been feeling brave LOL

I started off with a bit of blue on the ‘sky’ area… I just ‘scribbled’ it on like I’d see people doing on You Tube and it seemed to work fine.

Then I used my finger to blend the colours together

Because the poppies were quite ‘high’ on the page I couldn’t get my fingers in close to the flowers so out came the paint brush and a bit of water… Gelatos are water soluble!

Next up it was time for some yellow… and a bit more scribbling!

More blending but this time with the stick blender that came with the box:

And then a bit more water brushing:

I wanted green at the bottom so I went through the process again:

This time I blended with one of the little sponges that came in the box and I think this might be my favourite way of blending the Gelatos!

I had my basic background by this stage so I started layering in some more colours and blending as I went:

By this stage I was pretty happy with the colours but I wanted to ‘soften’ them a bit so I got out a wet wipe and did a bit more blending until I was happy with the result:

Since I didn’t want to ruin my background when I did my flowers I decided to spray it with some fixative:

Ok… onto the poppies! I was determined to do ALL the colouring with Gelatos for this page but at this point my hands were ‘itching’ to grab out my Pan Pastels! I’m happy to report that the ‘determination’ won over the ‘itching’ and I’ve learnt heaps in the process!

I added some red to one of the poppy flowers by mixing it with a little bit of water on my brush but wasn’t that happy with the colour so I grabbed out a little eye shadow applicator and thought it might work…

and it worked absolutely fantastic!

I carried on doing the rest of the poppies and then started on the ‘buds’ with some chocolate Gelato:

The eye shadow applicator turned out to be great because it could get into all the little pieces of texture created with the modelling paste!

I added a little bit of the chocolate colour to the bases of the poppy flowers to create some more depth and then I sprayed my page with fixative again before moving on:

Next up was the stems. These proved to be quite tricky… even with the eye shadow applicator but it worked out in the end:

I thought my page was looking a little ‘flat’ at this point so I grabbed one of my Heidi Swapp stencils, a foam brush and some gesso and set to work:

Then I gave it a quick blast with the heat gun to dry the gesso… patience still isn’t one of my virtues!

The gesso dots were a little bit ‘in your face’ so I used the sponge applicator I’d used for the background and went over them to ‘soften’ them up a bit:

Now for some depth and shading! I got out my charcoal pencil and added some shadows to the stems and the bases of the poppies and then I used a wet paintbrush to smudge and soften the shadows: