New Uses for Old Christmas Cards

 As we get ready to celebrate the new year some of us are taking down our Christmas cards and deciding what to do with them. Which ones are the keepers and which go to the recycling, trash or can be used for craft projects.

I have one more solution that works well for me. A lot of them have shiny surfaces so they work well to lay my paints out on instead of using a palette or palette paper and best of all they are free.

I'm using small scraps of heavy/stiff watercolor paper and acrylic paints to see which kinds of strokes and effects that I can get with each of my palette knives. First I tried a standard mixing knife and was pleased with the results.

Here you see the results along with the knife I used. I could have stopped here and made a card out of it but...

I was listening to the news this morning as I was working and wondering if I could capture the feeling I was having of what it must be like with the snow hitting some of the lava flows in Hawaii. The results were no where close to anything recognizable and I seem to have spoiled the previous painting. What do you think?

This was my 2nd exercise and I used a diamond head knife for this one. I liked the fact that the areas of color it put down were more delicate and less defined than the basic knife.

You can see quite a bit of difference between the two.

I nearly called the painting finished at this point until a friend and artist suggested that it looked like a bunch of flowers at which I took as a challenge as I went back to work on it.

I used both the pallete knife and a couple of brushes to achieve this result.

 

The 3rd exercise involved a much larger knife and should have been done on a larger surface.

To me it began to suggest a couple of people working in an art class but when I tried to develop that theme, the painting failed so I will be painting over it very soon. Don't worry, every failure just builds a strong surface for your next success.

Thanks for joining me and be sure to comment below. I'll be continuing my experiment with my collection of odd shaped palate knives over the next few days so you may want to pop back in and check the results.

I ordered very few art supplies last year beyond sample sets of both gouache and acrylics in tiny tubes in less than half an ounce yet I had a very satisfying year of work. Read on (or back) to find out how I managed it an whether or not I want to go on that way in the year ahead.