Wanderlust 2022 - weeks one to seven - Gesso and Gel medium

I have been thoroughly enjoying Wanderlust 2022 - the mixed media art journaling course.  This is my second year and the format is a little different this time.  The course is split into seven-week blocks and each block explores different media. The first block was about gesso and gel medium.

Week one began with an overview of the media and then a project using clear gesso and a photograph.  

Week Two was using gesso and seedheads, stems etc. as brushes.  It is supposed to be a view of poplar trees out of the window, but Chris thought it looked like a battlefield.

Week three was using gel medium through a stencil as a resist and then colouring around it with water soluble crayons to reveal the word. I had more success using water based Distress ink.

Week four was using gesso through a stencil, applying it thickly and marking into it, using it to cover materials such as lace and cardboard, stamping into it and mixing it with small amounts of colour.  There was a lot of layering involved!

For the fifth week, we used white and black gesso in thin layers. I cut the eyes out of magazines and decided to give only one figure a mouth.  This piece has a meaning to me as it represents how women have not had much of a voice throughout history.

The sixth week was about using coloured gesso in light layers.  I didn't have any coloured gesso, so made my own using a tiny bit of acrylic paint mixed in.  There was also stencilling and mark making in the gesso.

The final week of this first block was about using charcoal and gesso. Charcoal is not something I use very much, so it was good to be pushed out of my comfort zone.   It involved sketching flowerheads with charcoal and using gesso to blend areas, as well as scraping charcoal onto a page and blending with water.

I really enjoyed finding out what gesso and gel medium could do, learning new-to-me techniques along the way.  Roll on the next block - image transfer and modelling paste/texture paste.