If you’re just getting started with fabric painting, you may not have heard of these two handy aids that experienced artists rely on to make painting easier and create better-looking painted pieces. They’re called fabric medium and gel medium, and you’ll be glad when you’ve gotten to know them.
What are acrylic mediums?
Fabric medium and gel medium are thick fluids made of the same kind of acrylic polymers that go into acrylic paints, but without the pigments that give paints their colors. They look opaque when wet but are colorless when dry. Each one has a different role to play in enhancing your fabric painting.
What is fabric medium, and how can I use it for painting?
Fabric medium serves a number of useful purposes in fabric painting:
- Dilutes or thickens acrylic fabric paints without affecting their color.
- Slows down drying time so you can blend colors without having to worry that they’ll dry before you finish.
- Keeps fabric from stiffening as the paint or ink dries.
- When colors are thinned with water, adding fabric medium minimizes color bleeding.
- When you paint rough or heavy fabrics such as canvas, fabric medium helps the paint penetrate the surface so you get good coverage without having to scrub the surface first.
How much fabric medium should I use?
For blending colors or extending wet time, mix the medium 1:1 with acrylic paint. Add more paint to get a more opaque look, and use more medium to achieve a more translucent effect. You can apply medium directly to fabric to blend colors.
To minimize color bleeding when you use water-thinned paints, mix fabric medium 5:1 with fabric paint.
What is gel medium, and how does it help with fabric painting?
Gel medium does some of the same things fabric medium does: like fabric medium, it extends the drying time of acrylic paints or inks, giving you a longer time to work on a painting and perfect your color blends. Gel medium also serves several other useful purposes in fabric painting and textile arts. Gel medium comes in several different thicknesses and gloss or matte finishes. Use gel medium to:
- Glue paper or objects to fabric for collages.
- Create a permanent protective coating for collages or paintings that is UV-resistant, water-resistant, and non-yellowing.
- Seal porous surfaces before painting them.
- Make any fabric into a do-it-yourself fusible. Just coat the back of the fabric with a thin, even coat of gel medium, let the it dry, cut the fabric to the desired shape, then use a press cloth to iron the gel-coated fabric to the background fabric.
- Use as a substitute for gesso for painting with acrylic paints on canvas. Thicker gel mediums will show your brush strokes and help create a 3-D impasto (dimensional) effect in your painting.
- Transfer images from paper or transparencies onto fabric.
Where can I buy fabric medium and gel medium?
Acrylic mediums mediums are available at art supply or crafts stores anywhere.
Immobilienmakler Heidelberg Makler HeidelbergSource by Christine Mann