Welcome to the September Project Art post! I was really excited to work with the Liquitex string gel, because it’s such a fun product that really adds a unique dimension to your projects. The kit contains a 8 oz jar with this fun gel! It also contains two “fragments” designed by Ronda Palazzari to use as masks, an exclusive Cocoa Daisy stamp “little dots”, a Fude Ball pen, a tube of Dina Wakley acrylic paint “ruby”, a graph card and a piece of sewing pattern.

The string gel has a honey-like consistency and it dries clear and glossy. A tiny warning regarding the glossy finish – when working in your art journal there is a risk that your pages will stick together. It may be possible to avoid this by using some kind of varnish but I haven’t really tried that yet. You can also paint over the gel (like I did in the last example of today’s post) with matte acrylic paint. I think I need to try putting some clear gesso on top, to see if that helps. The gel may also be flattened a bit when used in your journal, but I don’t really have a problem with that.

I have included samples created in my journals today, as well as examples of other projects where I’ve used the gel. I hope you’ll be inspired by the many possibilities!

So what does the gel do? The string gel allows you to create crazy cool patterns with strings of paint – for example like this.

It’s kind of messy but it’s soooo much fun!

When mixing the gel with paint, it’s recommended that you mix carefully and then cover your container up and let the gel + paint sit for a while before using it, to avoid air bubbles. However, I am very impatient… and I didn’t do this. You can see some bubbles in my paint, but I don’t really mind.

You don’t need much paint when mixing and the type of paint you use will affect the final result. The consistency of the gel will be different if the paint is fluid or heavy bodied, for example. My suggestion is that you try different paints and that you allow yourself to experiment!

You don’t have to mix the gel with paint. It dries clear and you can use it as it is, or you can paint on top of the gel when it’s dry.

Here’s a little video I made… just to show you some examples of the gel in action…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afKD852LDa8?feature=player_detailpage]

Here’s the card shown in the video… I used one of the previous stamps and Zing Gold Glitter Embossingpowder. I was a bit scared that the gel would melt when heat embossing, but luckily I was ok!

And this is the result of dragging the acrylic ink around with the stick. You can see the transparent effect of the gel in the green. If I had added more green paint I could have achieved a more opaque look.

I created a very simple layout using the stringy green and yellow background that I showed you above. I just added some very tiny details and of course my photo of baby Tuva… (time flies – this was taken three years ago!).

I have another layout in the works. I imagine I will only add a few details + some journaling to this one too. This time I added the photo to my background first and let some of the gel go over the corners of the photo.

I also created another card, with gel + golden acrylic ink as a background.

This image below is just to show you how the gel may get slightly flattened when you close your journal…

I created the pattern above with gel + black paint and when it was dry I added gel + other colours (Dina Wakley acrylic paint in lime and Liquitex acrylic ink in gold) to some of the areas enclosed by the black lines.

I turned this into a journal page, using bits and pieces from the kits.

This is an example of pages sticking together… I’m not panicking though… I’m thinking that I’ll just add more paint… 🙂

Below is another example of a mistake… (I do make mistakes, all the time… I just try to go with it and change direction when I have to… Most of the time it works out in the end, even if it didn’t turn out the way I envisioned…)

For this page I had added the clear gel, thinking that it would act as a resist. I then misted on top of the dry gel and at first it looked like it was working exactly the way I wanted, but then… the ink started to soak into the paper under the gel… You can see a tiny piece of white up in the right corner… but most of the paper under the gel turned blue.

I waited for the ink to dry and then tried adding another colour on top. Again, the ink soaked into the paper under the gel.

I then decided to add some acrylic paint to my page and I smeared some paint on top of the gel, to make the pattern stand out. Finally I had a result that I was happy with! I finished my page by adding some black splatters (mist), messy thread and the YOLO card from the Quiet Please add on.

I die cut the little star above from a paper which I had first painted (with palette knife) with gel mixed with yellow and golden paint and then stamped using the fabulous dot stamp that came with the Project Art kit. The gel gives a nice glossy finish to the little star!

This page below was a page that started out as a “waste central”… I added my excess paint+gel to this page, instead of throwing it away. I also practiced writing with the gel.

The colours were pretty horrible though and I decided to add paint (Dina Wakley acrylic paint). I tried wiping the paint off the black letters, to stop them from disappearing in the paint.

I then added letter stickers and some journaling using the Fude Ball pen from the kit. I love how the ink flows from the pen – it’s really easy to write with – but it dried a little slower than I expected and I had some smearing happening. It didn’t really matter on this messy page though. 🙂

I hope you enjoyed these ideas and most of all I hope that you get your string gel out and play and experiment! I would love to see the result!