It’s Monday, and you know what that means, right? New goodies in the store! Yay!

I’ve always loved painting. I love the feel of the brush swish-swashing across the canvas. Love splashing colors. (Hm. I guess you can tell that I generally like making a mess… with paper and art materials, that is. :)).

My preferred medium is oil (I like the slick texture of oil and the way you can apply it thinly or thickly to achieve different effects). Here’s one of my paintings (the hubby’s favorite! :D):

I haven’t painted with oil in a long time, though, because I have such difficulty finding the time (with five kids, I find myself cleaning up messes more than creating them :lol:). Oil requires time-commitment (not the least of which involves the drying time and the time spent on cleaning and washing the brushes!)

So these days I find myself generally limited to messing around on a much smaller scale LOL!:

Which brings us to this Monday’s new product in my shop 😉

Singing the Blues

If you love the effect of paint but hate the clean-up after ;), now you can get that artsy goodness without having to worry about smeared paint on your tabletops or spilled water containers or paintbrushes to wash over the sink! 🙂

My newest goodie in my shop lets you turn your layouts and projects into works of art with these 6 real swashes of paint!

I’ve handpainted all these swashes and then lovingly extracted them so that they retain their awesome texture, in various sizes, with the largest one measuring about 10inches (Feel free to resize as you desire!). Each swash comes in its original blue color and in a greyscale version, so that you have maximum versatility. They come in .png format (transparent files) so you can use them with whatever program you create your magic with!

You can use these as photo masks or masks for paper or as artistic accents for your layouts and projects. (If you use these as photo masks and you work with Photoshop, I suggest clipping your photo to the greyscale version of the paint swash, merging it, then setting your blending mode to soft light and duplicating it a couple of times so you get the awesome texture and effect of paint. 😉 ).   Really, there are no limits to these; let your creativity soar as you play with these!

Oh, and this set is Vol.1 … which means we’ve got more painting goodness coming up soon! 😉

Guess what else? This baby is 25% off today, so if the painting without the mess rocks your boat, go row quickly to my shop and grab this off the shelf before it goes on regular price again!  Click HERE or on the product image above to get some shopping therapy :).

The Best Messes

I just love-LOVE-L.O.V.E. the awesome masterpieces that our JessicaSprague.com creative team members have come up with using my Paint Swashes. Prepare to feast on these stunning works of art!

Sarah used my paint swash both as an accent and a background for her journaling. I think it’s just A+wesome! (Pairing it up with the torn paper effect also works major wonders!)

Monica turned my paint swashes white and used them to give her layout that awesome “messy” look, perfect for adding that “boyish” feel to her wonderful layout  (“Messy” in quotes because as you can see, everything is really perfectly put together!)

I love how Jana incorporated the paint swash in her layout so that it looks like an extension of the water in her photo. I think it’s just simply amazing and maaahvelous!

And I love how Renee demonstrates on her layout that using the paint swash in its original greyscale version totally works wonders as well! (It also gives her layout a totally pulled-together unified look! Fab!).

So you see, you can really use these paint-y babies in a kajillion ways and in all the colors of the rainbow! Now excuse me a moment while I go searching for these creative ladies to give them humongous hugs for their amazing art :D.

Happy swish-swashing around, and go paint the town BLUE! (Or red or green or orange… you get my drift… :lol:)