Scrap your scraps: Acrylic Paints 3 Ways : Updating Older Supplies

Hi everyone! Tiffany O'Grady here with some ideas to use those acrylic paints you might have hanging around your craft room. Watercolors are really popular and trending right now, and I absolutely love them, but that means the acrylic paints I already have are more likely to be forgotten and neglected. I don't want that to happen, so I challenged myself to pull them out and get them on a page. At the same time I pulled one of my oldest collections - Seen and Noted by Pebbles - and decided to pair them together to breathe new life into both supplies.

If video works better for you, you can also see the whole process on myYouTube Channel.

Supplies:

Your choice of patterned paper and photos. I am using papers from Seen and Noted by Pebbles, Everyday Eclectic by Echo Park and Daydreamer by Dear Lizzy)

Acrylic paint - craft quality is just fine. I am using white and black

Paint brushes - one wide flat brush and one narrow round brush. I am using a 3/4" flat brush and a #2 round brush that I got in an inexpensive variety pack.

1) Create a "base layer" for your photo cluster and tame a busy background
Choose a background paper that is bright and busy. This technique will work with a more subdued background, or even plain colored cardstock, but I thought it would be a fun way to use a piece of one of my favorite papers from this collection ("Memories" from Seen and Noted by Pebbles).
I'm going t create a base layer for my photo cluster by painting a messy rectangle in white directly on the background. Before grabbing my paint, I put all of my paper layers together to make sure the paint is the right size. No sense doing the work and then completely covering it up. I then laid the cluster on the background, marked the area with a pencil, and painted a rectangle with white acrylic paint. I wanted the background pattern to show through a bit, so I did a light layer with lots of visible brush strokes, but you can make it more neat or more opaque if that looks better for your project. Painting is fun because there aren't any rules!

2) Update a collection by making your own trendy design
Ombre is one of my favorite looks right now, and I love to use it to make my own embellishments, but this line didn't have any ombre papers because it came out before that trend was really popular. I could have cut into an ombre paper from another line, but because I wanted the painted look on this layout, I just made my own. You could absolutely do this by mixing white and colored paint, but I don't have any teal acrylic paint. It's all about using what I have on hand, so I used mist (specifically Dylusions Vibrant Turquoise). I mixed a spray of color into white paint, to create a pale teal.

Then I painted horizontal strokes onto a scrap piece of white cardstock. I added more spritzes of mist to the paint, mixed it into a medium shade of teal and continued to paint he horizontal lines. As I went down the cardstock. I added more and more mist to my paint, blending a little and leaving lots of brushstroke texture to create an ombre effect. After it was dry, I punched big stars out of it, but you could also use it like any piece of patterned paper.

3) Splatter it like mist or ink
When I had my basic design finished, I took some black acrylic paint and added a few spritzes of water to thin it out a bit. Then I dipped a small paintbrush into the thinned paint, held it by the end, and tapped near the brush end to splatter droplets across the page. My favorite part about this is that if you leave the paint a bit thick, it leaves dimension on the page when it dries. It's also really opaque and matte, which I love!

4) Bonus! Color wood veneers
Lastly, a fourth tip for you. I had a lot of the black paint left over, so I used it to recolor some tiny star wood veneers. Again, it's really opaque and matte, and if you were using a color other than black you would know it matches your other elements. It's also less messy than ink or mist and you only need one application to get full coverage.

Layering, ombre, splatters, and wood veneers all worked together to make an older collection seem fresh. I also added Thickers in a brush script (the Kal Barteski font in white) to maintain the painted feel. I originally planned to do my own brush script title with the black paint, but I just don't like my handwriting well enough and I couldn't make it work. It's a fun idea for you to try though! The other main elements are cameras which I detail cut out of Dear Lizzy Daydreamer paper.

I hope you give one of these tips a try, or that I've sparked some other idea that encourages you to pull out those acrylic paints and get them on a project.

If you make something inspired by this post, we'd love to hear from you, so leave a comment!

Tiffany O'Grady
Creative Team Member of SCRAP YOUR SCRAPS

I've been meaning to get around to bringing out my acrylic (or as I always called them, tole) paints ever since I started watching different scrappers, and now that Tiffany has shown us some fantastic techniques I decided to give it a try too!
For my layout I just went with the simple technique of white washing the background with paint. The background was a very busy chevron so I figured this would tame it down a little and give me a good base for my photos.
I watered down my paint just a little as I was going so that the background would still show through a little. I also added a little bit in the corner so that I could journal right on the paper without needing a journaling tag.