Hot Melt Glue and Metallic Paints Wall Art

Hi Folks! Welcome to another Itsy Bitsy Tutorial! Hope you guys had a great weekend!

For lot of people, mainstream art is very daunting. To the extent that many people do not even give it a shot, assuming that they cannot paint. The mixed media technique however, has encouraged lot of people to at least try their hand at art. Many have been pleasantly surprised that they actually can create fantastic pieces of art using alternative techniques and gradually moved on to fine arts.

Today, we are going to explore a technique using hot melt glue and metallic paints to make beautiful textured wall arts. This technique is very easy. You draw the basic drawing on the canvas with the hot glue, let it cool and paint over this glue drawing. And that’s it. You end up with spectacular piece of art :)

Supplies Needed:

Hot Glue Gun.
Hot Melt Glue Sticks
Canvas or MDF Board
A light coloured Colour pencil (optional)
Metallic paints in your choice of colours.

Use at least two shades (dark and light) of each colour. This will help bring out the texture more dramatically. You can use more shades and colours to add more detailing or depth. We have used: Blues - (Paradise Bay, Prussian Blue & Velvet Night), Greens - (Rich Olive & Broccoli), Gold and Rust.

Tools Required:

Paintbrush
Sponge or Felt Applicator

Method:

First things first, decide on a drawing. In this tutorial we are making a landscape. But you can also make an abstract or any other scene/drawing of your choice.

We began with making the basic drawing on the canvas with the hot glue, using glue gun. We used more glue where we needed more texture and dimension (the trunk of the tree). Once the drawing is complete, we let the glue cool and harden.

Note: If you prefer to work with a guideline you can also make your drawing with a light coloured pencil before starting with the glue gun.

Then we blocked large areas with light coloured paints to do the under painting. (Paradise Bay for water and sky, Gold for tree, land and mountains).

Note: Hot melt glue can be painted over easily with acrylic paints.

For areas where we wanted to add more texture, we used the heat gun on the wet acrylic paint. This makes the paint bubble and form a lovely textured surface (We did this for land, foliage).

Please note that heat will melt the glue again, so be careful and use the heat gun in short bursts and try to avoid heating the areas with glue for long.

Once the paint was dry, we started adding the darker shades of colours to the areas where we wanted to bring out the texture or add more definition (Prussian Blue for water waves and clouds, Velvet Night for part of sky and water, Broccoli for foliage and Rust for the tree trunk).

At this point we also decided to add some extra texture to the clouds with the heat gun. Once the darker shades were dry, we went over those areas very lightly with lighter shades of the same colour to add highlights (Paradise Bay for water and clouds, Gold for trunk and Rich Olive for Foliage and part of land.

The idea here is that the crevices and grooves should stay dark and the ridges should be lighter in colour. That will help give more of a 3D look and bring out the contrast. You can also use a sponge or felt applicator for the application of the highlight colours. Just make sure that you dab them very gently so that the colour does not get into the grooves.

You artwork is done! Mount it on frame and display proudly J

To keep it simple we have used limited number of colours and a very basic drawing. You can use this technique with more colours and a more detailed drawing. It works equally well for making abstract and figurative artworks

Here are a few examples to get you started: