Painted Rock Sculptures

I go to a market every Thursday (Oxted Country Market) and over the course of the morning it varies in busyness. At the quieter times, I get to talk to the other crafters and occasionally we will bounce ideas off each other of what new and exciting thing we can work on next. It was during one of these conversations that we came up with the idea of me making painted rock sculptures.

I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was going to do while making these, so it ended up being a huge experiment of what worked and didn’t work and what effect looked best. Some of these definitely look better than others, but you don’t know for sure if something will look good unless you try it and see!

I started by collecting suitable sized pebbles from my garden and local area and then stacked them on top of each other, mixing them around until I was happy with the arrangements of each sculpture. Using a hot glue gun, I stuck the pebbles together to secure them in place.

To paint them I used a combination of watered-down acrylic paint, fluid acrylics and metallic paints. I wasn’t sure what effect I wanted at this stage, so I tried out a few techniques, including pouring the paint either from directly over the top or from one side on the second pebble and dripping/drizzling paint across in lines. I was also doing some more fluid painting at the same time and so experimented with the leftover paint I had from that, to see if it created an interesting effect.

I have a few more sculptures that I have stuck together that still need painting. I’m going to be doing more fluid painting in the coming days, so I intend to use that on some of them, but I’m still undecided on what to do with the rest of them. I think the black/gold and black/silver works well, so I might try some more natural/earth tones with metallics to see how that comes out.