Art Fun Cheap

Shrink plastic is used commercially for many purposes. Stacks of boxes are sometimes shrink-wrapped for easier storage and transport. Gift baskets are often covered with decorative shrink-plastic film. Disposable plastic drink cups are made from it, too.
Someone accidentally shrinking the clear top of a delicatessen container is said to have led to the invention […]

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Experimentation is the secret of having art fun on the cheap. Here is something I discovered by playing with things I happen to have lying around the house.
If you don’t care about archival qualities, nail polishes can be used as paper glazes. The glitter is usually very fine and well distributed, it’s easy to […]

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Making your own paper glazes can be fun. Most of us have plenty of art supplies (or potential art supplies) lying around. Sometimes we have more than we realize. Why not play with them to discover new ways to use them?
Acrylic Medium for a Waterproof Glaze
have some fine glitter that I plan to mix […]

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Paper glazes look a lot like thin glitter glue spread thinly over paper. Some paper glazes contain glitter; others have small confetti mixed in. Some have both.
But paper glazes also impart a quality of their own. There also seems to be a bit of acrylic medium in paper glazes that can add strength and […]

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Instead of water-based colors, some people prefer using decorator chalks sometimes. Frankly they look just like pastels to me, but they come in small flat pads in a case, rather than in sticks like pastels. Instead of picking up the piece of colored chalk and rubbing it on the paper, you use your finger […]

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Rainbow Stix pencils are some of my favorite cheap, wonderful art tools. As I wrote in September, though, in Pencils that Write a Rainbow, they had disappeared from the stores about three years ago.
Then last Thursday afternoon, surprise! My local dollar store had just gotten in a huge supply of them. (Naturally I bought […]

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I often use inexpensive square note paper as origami paper. It comes in many colors, and even the white paper can be easily decorated in a thousand different ways.
The common 3 1/2 by 3 1/2-inch memo cube paper is exactly the right size for folding small cranes, for example, to fit on artist trading […]

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Sometimes you want more than the normal flat watercolor or acrylic colors. Daniel Smith, for example, offers lovely interference (changeable, depending on angle of view), metallic, and irridescent/pearly colors. But what if you just want to try such colors without investing in professional-quality paints?
You can buy inexpensive ones. Or you can make your own. […]

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The brushes that come with cheap watercolors are usually just junk. Generally they are not worth even trying to use. (Save them to use for glue and other one-time uses.)
That’s why, as I mentioned in Cheap, Fun Watercolors, I was surprised to find that the brush that came with Coloriffic watercolors was quite good. […]

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Cheap watercolors are generally full of fillers, which means they look great in the package but are too diluted for real watercolor painting, They are fun to play with, though, and are great for art journaling and other uses (where light colors are what you want).

Generally, if watercolors look pretty in the package, they […]

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