Back to the Sandbox!

I still have bags of colored sand, leftovers from long ago projects.  The other day when I didn't have any black lava gel, I decided to put some of the old sand to use.

Above:  gloss heavy gel that I'll mix with the purple sand.

Above:  on the left the gel is ready to be added the sand with an art spatula.  On the right is the substrate, an old calendar page that I've painted over.

As the above photo shows, I've mixed the sand and gel.  And I've placed two of my 6" x 6" stencils -- Trivet A on the left and Trivet C on the right -- side-by-side on the substrate. 

The next step was to spread the mixture thru the stencils with one hand, while holding them firmly in place with the other hand.  (Another option would have been to use masking tape to hold the stencils in place.)

The photo below shows the results, as soon as the two stencils were lifted.  The gel will turn transparent after drying, but while still fresh, it appears white.

Note:  When using any kind of three-dimensional medium, I put the stencils into a basin filled with water, to be cleaned later.  Three-dimensional media can easily clog stencil openings if allowed to dry on the stencils.

After the gel dried, the sand became visible again.  In the photo below, the sand color appears closer to gold than to its original purple.  But that's just the lighting.

After doing this exercise, I got my hands on some Liquid Black Lava Gel -- which is gloss gel containing a mixture of fine-grained glitter (mica bits?) and black sand (or plastic bits that resemble sand?)  I used this gel in the same way as above, time time on stretched canvas, and this time with my 9" x 12" stencil Boxed Vines.

Above:  I added Golden High Flow acrylics after the gel had dried. 

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