Artists I Adore: Meeting Marah Johnson

Hi Friends! I got a chance to take a class from Marah Johnson recently. She's a designer for Creative Imaginations and a lover of Lumninarte, a company that Creative Imaginations recently acquired.

Lumninarte creates a product called Twinkling H2O's… they look a bit like something from the MAC makeup counter– both the packaging and the colors inside.

Basically they are these little pots of paint infused with mica so they shimmer and sparkle. They come in 156 blendable colors. They are similar to watercolors. To use them, you spritz the little pots and the paper you want to use them on.

The Twinkling H20's bead up on glossy paper and adhere to more mat paper.

They adhere to the textured part of flocked paper. And you can blend-blend-blend different shades and them blend some more. As Marah said about a million times, "Water is your friend!" and it really is when it comes to this product… it's pretty cool.

I was entranced by how pretty the paper towels that we were working in top of turned out.

You can paint directly on shapes.

And you can dry them with a heat gun and use adhesive (Marah recommends Zip Dry) to layer the elements.

 You can also paint some paper with the Twinkling H20's and then… put SALT on them. Then you dry the paper again and you get this "tie dye" texture.

Playing with these products was like going back to your elementary school art class messing around with watercolors. Only the colors are better and brighter AND you DON'T have to stay in the lines. In fact, it's discouraged.

 Here's the painting outside the lines!