martha stewart craft paint for surface design?

I marched into the studio with purpose this morning, determined to play with these before the day got under way:


I mentioned them a couple of posts ago and I've had ideas swirling ever since I brought them home.

I tend to be pretty brutal with the paints I use in my artwork. One of the things that can really skew whether or not I keep a line around is how decent the opacity (which refers to whether or not you can see through them) on them is. I work on fabric that already has color on it, I rarely begin with white so any paint I use has to be able to hold its own over whatever the base color of the fabric is.

I grabbed a piece of my hand dyed turquoise out of the pile and laid three different colors down:


Here are my thoughts on the paint.

1. The orange on the far left was just painted on with a paintbrush. Awesome thickness, obviously great opacity. This is the first orange I've found that reads as such when it goes down over another color. So already the paint is scoring points with me there. :)

2. The grey squiggly in the middle was done with these tips. Can I just say I fell in love when I used it? (I need to buy about a hundred more of them...) You can get thin lines or thick or whatever you like but the opening on them is excellent for controlling the flow of paint. Love.

3. The swipes on the far right were done with these sponge brush attachments. Again, super easy to use and they even gave consideration on how to clean them out without a lot of fuss. Worked like a charm.

I will say this - they do add stiffness to the fabric. If you're creating wearable art or home decor where this would matter, you'd want to add her textile medium to the paint to help eliminate some of that.

But for what I do? For wall art where its not a concern and I'm already throwing a ton of different things at the work? I've no issue with the little bit of stiffness added to it. In fact, I grabbed one of my in progress Remnant Collages, attached the fine tips to a couple of colors and added some details.

These collages are dependent on layering and that was one of the reasons I got excited about the different attachments for the bottles. Anything that makes my life easier is aces in my book. Here is the one I played on a little bit this morning:


Here are close ups on the parts that I doodled on with the paint:





All in all, I love it. The color range is outstanding, the attachments for the bottle work really well and its really clear that the line was developed by crafters. They gave consideration to just about everything.

You can do a lot more with the paint then what I did. Check it out here for all the nitty gritty (use it as spray paint, she has a glitter and high gloss line, different tools, etc). This is a line that I'll be using in my work a lot, I can already tell.