Gel Medium 101

We believe that right next to gesso, gel mediums are mixed media artists' best  friends! :)

That's why we thought to celebrate the fact and offer you a special discount week on all Talens gel mediums and Amsterdam acrylic paints!
(see the end of the post for more details)

But that's not all -

we also have our lovely talented Linda sharing all sorts of inspiring tips & tricks about how to use gel medium in your art!

Hi there creatives, today it is all about Talens Gel Medium and great ways of using it.

First of all, gel medium in general can range in thickness from watery to very thick and have lots of different finishes. The Talens gel found in Mixed Media Place store has two different finishes: Matte and Gloss. Today I want to show you a few ways of how I use gel medium.

Matt: I typically use matt when I make collages and don't want a glossy result on my project. I also use it to increase the transparency and reduce the gloss of acrylic paints.

Gloss: I often tend to use it on canvas and on projects I want to have a glossy finish. When I use it in my art journal, I usually put a sheet of wax paper or something similar between the pages, the glossy effect sometimes makes the pages stick together and this prevents it from doing so.

I also use gel medium to glue, seal, prime, reduce the use of paint (mixing it with paint is cost effective), image transfers, altering heavy goods to a canvas (extra heavy gel medium is perfect for this), making texture and the list keeps going. Below you can see some of my projects where gel medium is playing a big part of the result.

The cloud below is made out of acrylic skin made of gel medium gloss mixed with blue paint. When dry, I stamped on a cloud and cut it out.

These hearts needed 3 days of drying time, but it was worth waiting. I stamped on one, painted the back on another and the rest I kept as they where because I loved the pink color they had taken from the stencil.

Here I've used gel medium to create the pattern:

which is as simple as putting a layer of gel medium mixed with acrylic paints through a stencil:

Finally, I have a short video making an image transfer with gel medium creating this beauty using Talens Gloss Gel Medium:

Are you feeling inspired and encouraged by Linda's creativity? :)

The good news is you can grab any Talens gel medium that suits your needs AND any color of acrylic paint by Amsterdam in our store and get 10% off on all these products!

Simply enter this discount code at the checkout:

%aS2mmP%

 The discount works from August 8th 'till 15th