Tantalizing textures..

I have always been attracted to artwork with texture, I just love it when there's thick layers of paints or a rough surface. In my own work I've been playing around with textures on and off, in the beginning I used to create textured skies with paper mache and in past couple of months I have been doing a lot of experiments with a variety of textured mediums.

These past few weeks my love of textures has become somewhat of an obsession. I did a round of all the local hardware stores to beg them for old wall paper books. Unfortunately that search came up empty so I've been scouring the local art supply stores for cool textured paper. 

I'm adding these awesome textures to my painting surface before adding the gesso and I am loving the effects of that in my final works! So far I've done some black and white pieces that have a very graphic feel to them, but I'm also working on a couple of pieces in color. 

I've mostly been combining the textures with direct transfers, but soon I will be adding this to some of my gel skin photo montages. I'm even thinking of combing it with the pouring medium I've been working with. 

This year has been all about experimenting in the studio and the time invested in definitely paint off. I feel like everything I've been working on is coming together now. I have a whole bunch of paintings that are wanting to be finished, I've even switched gears in some of them so I could incorporate the lovely pieces of paper that I've found. 

I'm super excited to move forward with this and I can't wait to see what will come out of my studio in a couple of weeks. So many paintings to finish... so little time... got to get back to work now... textures are waiting!