Snowflakes & Small Nut Eating Rodents with Bushy Tails

Detail from Arts Enrichment Art

Experimenting with materials is part of what makes art exciting. Sometimes the experiment isn't a success, sometimes it yields results that aren't expected and sometimes a little of all of the above happens. On the weekend had my art exploration classes attempt a painting technique using an Epsom salt solution as a wash. I've used the wash before but with watercolour paints and gotten some wonderful crystallisation effects once the paint was dry.

Art Exploration winter mixed media 

Just to see what would happen I tried the solution with heavily diluted tempera paint. While the tempera didn't allow for the crystal formation a translucent paint would have given us there was some beautifully heavy granulation of the pigment in the paintings that we ended up with.

I thought to revisit the technique again using the liquid ink that was made using liquid food colouring with my Arts enrichment artists and this time it was successful. When I left Artspace this afternoon the edges of some of the paintings had the beginnings of Jack Frost's signature fern pattern making an appearance where the solution had been heavily deposited on the paper.

Both the Arts Enrichment and the Art Sparks classes made use of squirrels in their work this week. I drew squirrel outlines onto paper for the Art Sparks artists. They used chalk pastel to draw a background and snowflakes. We then collage strips of brown paper to make a nest for our squirrel. We finished off by adding glitter to our snowflakes.

The Arts Enrichment used oil pastel for snowflakes, collaged a snowy landscape and painted on a wash of liquid ink mixed with Epsom solution.

ArtSparks Mixed Media with chalk pastel

You can see the finished art on this post here