Gesso How-To

Good morning to all of my scrappy-happy friends!

I am very excited to share a Gesso How-To with you - this stuff ROCKS!  I came across gesso while reading a scrapbook magazine and I just fell in love with the look.  I’m a clean-and-simple style of scrapper and this rocked with my inner-scrappiness.

Gesso is an acrylic base that is used by canvas artists.  They use it to prime the canvas in order to prep their work surface.  In order to find it, you will need to look in the fine arts section of your local hobby stores.  I snapped up a pint of the white gesso ran home as fast as my little legs could carry me and opened up the jar immediately for some crafty fun.

The supplies pictured above are:

12” x 12” kraft card stock

paintbrush

gesso

2” x 4” green card stock

The really cool thing about gesso is that you can spread it on with a brush or with a card (I’ve seen blogs where gals use a plastic card - you know those endless gift cards that you have at the bottom of your purse - they work great, too!).  I used both.

When I was prepping the 12” x 12” kraft card stock, I brushed on the gesso and I used my green card stock to spread it on.  Then I also dabbed with my brush to finish off the area I wanted to cover with the gesso.

You do need to give it a few minutes to dry and then continue working on your layout.  I really like the way that ink and mists look on the gesso as well as some doodling.

Here’s another layout that I did with gesso - this was my first trial run at it.

One other thing that I’ve leaned about gesso is that you can put it on very lightly almost like a whitewash or you can glob it on and then create designs in this medium.  So I tried my hand at it on an 8.5” x 11.5” piece of kraft card stock.  I globbed on some gesso and then took a paperclip and dragged it through the gesso creating random patterns.

Once the gesso was dried (about an hour), I created this layout of my husband when we were camping last year in Iddlywild, CA.  This is how I feel about my husband after all these years ... captivated by him.

So, scrappy happy gal pals - I do hope that this is a technique/medium that you are going to try.  Have a wonderful scrappy day!!