A never-ending story - a beautiful journey with Dala

 
I know that I have mentioned my love of Dala supplies in the past. This is another Dala gushy post featuring their puff paint.  Guys, I am giving you the permission to steal this supply from your kids stash - it is so fun to mess with.

 A while back the framing shop SERENDIPITY (a Framing shop with some art and craft supplies) had a tiny bottle of Dala Puff paint in the kids craft section, so I got it - and then I forgot about it.  I just recently re-dicovered it.  Anyway the lid on this thing had split open at the top for some reason so the paint had started to dry out a bit but I discovered that this makes it work a little better than when it is fresh off the cart.  The slightly dried out, more viscous consistency of the paint - makes it easier to control on paper and you can scrape it into lines, run it over a stencil as a paste, it dries a little quicker as well, so you can mess about with puffing bit a little faster (which is always a plus when you are as impatient as myself).  

Puff Paint comes in the regular Dala brand colours and so while you can get it pre-coloured I like the white puff paint because you can paint or dye it whatever colour want and you can control to a fair degree where you want to colour the puff. Plus - it's all about the texture - this is the most grown-up kind of puff paint if you are into texture but want to move beyond the marshmallow puff kind of puffing paint.  With a heat gun you can puff this baby up straight away, or you can wait and let it dry naturally on the paper.  Depending on how you heat it and how thin or thick you strokes of paint are you can create tiny puff plumes or big billowy plumes of  puff.  I laid on the puff paint in dense gloopy globs and blasted it with a heat gun here to create the the whimsical "lavender" stalks .  While for the background texture - I kind scraped it on with a spatula tool and then created lines by dragging vertical stripes through with a disposable knife.  I also let this dry out a bit longer before I blasted with a hot hairdryer instead of a heat gun.  

The colouring was done with the Dala kids 12 block paint set that I mixed in a palette with drops of watered down Dala Dawing inks. I used Magenta, Turquoise, Yellow, Blue, Viridian and Green - but I blended them in various shades to my preference.  This works surprisingly well and you can get the best spectrum with just a combination of inks and kids powder watercolour paint.  

On another side-note while we are talking about raiding your kids art supplies - another brilliant product from DALA to paint with is the kids liquid TEMPERA - the colours are so richly pigmented and lightfast, and it has a lovely almost liquid gel like feel to it, so it doesn't scrape on the paper and shred it, it also seems to make the paper less warpy than regular watery kids paint. While I am quite excited to share my Tempera experiments and will post on it in the future - I didn't use Tempera on this tiny project though.

The background stamping was done in Dala Black, Blue and Red Stamp Pad Ink that I mixed together and then watered down a little with glycerine, to give it a little smudgy sort of faded out effect, I liked that it kinda makes it look like badly printed fabric.  I poured this mixture into an empty stamp pad and stamped the background with that.  I find that just playing around with Dala regular stamp pad ink blends gives you the most vintage effects. If you add the right amount of ink to their Acrylic Retarder and lay that down on squished up paper, let it dry and then iron it out flat - you can create some really cool looking vintage background paper.   You can really do so much with these products if you are willing to experiment - I truly love this company, the fact that all their products work seamlessly with each other and the freedom it gives you to mess about with your own creativity without breaking the bank.

The lasso frame behind the bark was made from dyeing white paper covered wire with watered down Dala Golden Brown Drawing Ink.  The paper wire may or may not have been from Dala - I have no idea where it comes from - I am willing to go there though and say it because most of the craft items I get are from Dala.  

Anyway - this is my Dala appreciation post for today.  I am not sponsored neither am I affiliated with them in any way, I just really appreciate their stuff because it is well priced for the quantity you get and the quality is pretty decent compared to buying from abroad. It's good to support local and they deserve the mentions because it is literally my 'go-to' brand and I love it.

My future mad scientist experiment with Dala lovables is going to use the acrylic glaze as a "clear drawing ink" - I want to make metallic drawing inks - I have purchased the Dala Pearlescent Powders and my idea is to blend the powder with the glaze to make metallic drawing ink.  I will keep you posted if it works out!