Brayer Techniques

Acrylic paints are pretty much my number one pigment of choice, be it cheap craft paints or the higher-quality, artist-grade acrylic paints. I'm always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to use it. Using a brayer to apply acrylic paints to your artwork can have all kind of interesting effects - it's a bit of an adventure because it can be very hard to predict exactly what will happen, but I've rarely been disappointed. (The only times were when I used too much paint - a little acrylic paint goes a LONG way with a brayer, it can be far too easy to use too much and end up with a muddy mess.)

Probably my first encounter with using a brayer with acrylic paint was during a the first annual retreat for my local ATC group. One of our members led about fifteen of us through the exercise "Mail Art To The Self" from the book Kaleidoscope: Ideas & Projects to Spark Your Creativity. The exercise was created by artist Juliana Coles and I can't recommend it enough - I've done it several times since and it's always invigorating. Part of the exercise involves applying paint to a large surface as fast as you can, and she suggests using a brayer for that. Our exercise leader let me borrow hers and I was thrilled with the results!

As you can see from the close-up on the left here, the white paint I brayered onto my project picked up and highlighted all the textures on the surface. To achieve that highlighting effect I used a very small amount of paint and not too much pressure when rolling the brayer. You can also see some interesting peaks and valleys in the paint, which I love the look of. That's another great thing you get with brayering that you can't really replicate with any other painting tool. The amount of peaks and valleys varies depending on how much paint you use, and thicker, high-quality paint will also give this effect more.

Note that this is an example of what brayering looking like with just one color - the browns and greens you see are the original cardboard surface and the paint I'd applied with brushes and my fingers before I got my hands on the brayer.

Click on the image, it will take you to the full image of this page so you can see all the details.

If you look closely, you may notice this is where the photo at the top of the page came from!

Here's the journal spread I created after I watched the above video the first time. I grabbed a handful of my favorite bright colors of craft paint and dripped just a little bit of each color at a time, rolling the brayer back and forth at varying angles each time I added a new color. The brayering process smoothed the paint out so thinly that it dried very quickly and I could add more colors almost instantly without getting muddy results. It probably helped that it was a chilly day and my space heater made my studio nice and dry and warm!