Exploring Dendritic Painting

My online blogging and mail art friend, Jewels, over at Just Tickety-Boo, introduced me to the idea of dendritic painting.  She sent me a link to a You Tube video by Mike at Atomic Shrimp.  In under four minutes, Mike introduces a painting technique that kept me playing around for hours!

When I decided to give dendritic painting a try, I set up my workshop/play space in the kitchen, rather than my cream-color-carpeted art studio, for perhaps obvious reasons.

I gathered some favorite supplies:

         1.  paintbrushes (in a stylish storage pot)--

          2. a selection of papers (including watercolor, acrylic, Bristol, text,
          tag, and scrapbooking cardstock)--

          3. and a worktop protected by paper grocery bags, a huge supply
          of acrylic tube paints (thanks to my sister, two Christmases ago),
          and--most importantly--two pieces of 8x10 inch glass pilfered from
          some old picture frames in the basement--

Here is the basic process for how dendritic painting works:

Step 1: Squeeze a small amount of acrylic paint in one or several colors onto one piece of glass, and move it around with your paintbrush for roughly even coverage:

Step 2: Place the second piece of glass onto the first piece of glass, and hold down firmly so all parts of the surfaces touch one another. Often, but not always, I could see the interesting patterns start to emerge at this stage.

Step 3: Carefully pull the two pieces of glass apart, not letting them slide across one another; the trick is to be sure that one piece lifts directly off the top of the other.  At first I tried using the Xacto knife and the steel triangle above to help me, but I found it easier just to set the two pieces of glass off center from one another and pull them apart at the corners with my fingers.

Step 4: Take a moment to enjoy the interesting "dendritic" designs that remain on the glass.  Dendrites, as I understand it, are the branches that come out of a nerve cell. Rocks and minerals can also form these tree-like, branching patterns.  They have a wonderful organic, though amazingly precise, appearance that becomes even more evident in the next step.

Step 5: Place your chosen type of paper over the top of the paint-covered glass, and use your fingertips to gently press the paper to the paint.  I watched Mike's video, as well as videos by two different women using his technique, and everyone emphasized applying very little pressure to the paper. I found that my results were better when I was moved my fingers around slowly but firmly in all areas of the paper.  Carefully peel the paper up to see your print.

And because you have a second piece of glass, you can take a second print, which will offer something of a mirror image, with some color variables, for another piece of paper.

I think the results of this painting technique are quite amazing, especially looking close up at the branch-like effects:

In the sample above, I used three different colors, but mixed them pretty thoroughly on the glass.  For this next example, I kept three different colors in separate strips:

 Here were the resulting prints this time:

 Again, look at the amazingly detailed branch patterns:

 Some of my very favorite prints came from combinations of greens on the glass:

Greens are a natural choice for these kinds of patterns:

Don't these look like mountain ranges?

I thought for sure the paints on this glass wouldn't make a good print because they were so thick:

But the print came out very thickly textural, and still quite detailed:

After about two hours of playing around, I had a whole breakfast table full of papers using the dendritic painting technique:

Here are some other papers from the new collection:

 Gold paint on purple scrapbooking cardstock--royal!

 Black ink on French text page--interesting!

 White paint on blue cardstock--frosty!

A set of three different papers--cheerful!:

My kitchen work space survived its first experience with dendritic painting pretty well; it is surprisingly easy to clean up after (though I used a lot more paper towel than my environmentally-concerned self was totally comfortable with).  I think it will be seeing more of the technique in the future, since I had so much fun with it.

I will be using some of my prints to create mail art--at least one piece to send to Jewels!--so stay tuned for the finished results.