Texture of the Week: Produce Bags

My household goes through a fair amount of lemons, and frequently grapefruits. Usually, the most economical way to purchase these produce items is by the bag.

Over the years I've found these bags create a fantastic background texture for gel prints. While they're really a stencil with very small holes, the final results are similar to other netting or textured fine art papers I've tried, so I tend to use these bags like I would a texture tool.

For these prints, I started with a thin layer of paint, a mix of Cobalt Turquoise and Payne's Gray, laid a cut section of the produce bag on top of the paint and then pressed down a piece of deli paper. 

Thin papers, such as deli, tissue, or pattern paper, are wonderful at getting into the very small, rectangular gaps of the produce bag. 

Once I removed most of the paint from those tiny rectangles, I decided to leave the bag on the plate and add paint back inside the holes using a mix from the small dollop of the first color left on my palette knife and white.

It's possible I could've pulled the print at this point, but I wasn't sure how dry the first layer was, so I opted to let everything dry for a few minutes before pulling the final print with a layer of white.

I actually used a sample of Liquitex's new Bio Based acrylics for that final pull and it seemed to work well. This paint is heavy body, which I don't normally use, and doesn't appear as smooth when rolling it out, but it did the job for this print.

I really love the distressed layers created with this texture tool and the multiple layers of paint. It feels like either print would work well for collage or as a background element in a mixed media piece. What do you think?