Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: Water - Seth Apter Creative Team

Happy Friday! Today I'm sharing the fourth and last part of this month's series for Seth Apter Creative Team. This time I started already on Tuesday as I have four posts instead of the usual three. Let me tell you why there's four in a bit, but first you can find Seth Apter's site here (link) and more about the Creative team here (link). I've included a list of products to the end of the post with links to Seth's own store.

So, why there's four posts this time instead of the regular three, is because of the subject I was inspired by this time. Not so long ago Seth came out with some wonderful texture pastes. There's four of them - Crackled, Flakey, Beads and Sandy. Can you see where this is heading? I used each paste to create a piece, so there needed to be four. I also wanted the pieces to have a common nominator, something to tie everything together. I could have chose anything, but the number four made me think about elements - earth, fire, air and water - and thus the theme was chosen. I then paired each paste to an element and created a piece with a process video.

I'm working with the pastes in these pieces for the first time. I did a quick little swatch from each of them to see what they looked like for my pairing process for each element, but otherwise I just jumped head first to the pool and thought to see what I can make the pastes do. I also mixed in some recent newbies to the Izink product like, the Izink Pearly and Diamond.

I saved water as the last one as it's the last one I actually finished. Part of that is the way I made the background. Where as all the other three have painted backgrounds, for this one I went with something fitting for such a fluid element. I made the acrylic paints pourable using "Liquid Color Fluid Medium" - a liquid acrylic medium from the Finnabair line of Prima Marketing. I then poured the three colors to my background and moved them around to create kind of a marble effect with lighter and darker tones. Both the look and the process fitted the theme in my opinion. While the background was relatively quick to make, the drying time was the longest because of the thick layer of the medium.

The layers coming on top, then again, where fast to do. What I learned with this project was that the Pearly pastes have such an incredible amount of mica in them that they are almost opaque in thick layers! I applied so much paste to the top of the poured layer first that I needed to erase almost all so that the pattern underneath was still visible!

My first impression with the Sandy paste connected to water was beach, like I tell in the video. It reminded me of sandy dunes or the sandy bottom of the sea. But I ended up using it as froth or sea foam in the project. This way I didn't want to color the paste again, but to leave it as white. The consistency of the paste was also great for the top of the waves style as it was heavy body enough to keep its shape and keep those ridges I created with a palette knife. The sandy texture also reminds me of the Beads version but just with smaller bubbles. So, where as Beads could be foam in your bathtub, which you can see up close, Sandy can be the froth on top of waves, seen from a greater distance, like from a helicopter.

So, here they all are - all four pastes and all four elements! Which one is your favorite? Visually I think I funnily enough go for air, even though I usually am not keen on yellow, but paste-vise my favorite is probably Crackled. I can't wait to explore that "elephant skin" effect more!

Thank you for stopping by today! Wishing you a pleasant weekend!