FROZEN POPSICLE ART : Painting Elsa with Popsicles

Painting Elsa from Disney's Frozen with Popsicles. I've never tried drawing or painting with ice pops and it was a lot of fun, challenging, but fun. The painting smells wonderful. It has a sweet, fruity, bublegum smell that fills a whole room.

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Supplies used: Frozen Popsicles, cold press watercolor board, paper towels, glass jars, melted popsicles, and popsicle sticks.

Types of ice pops used : Two purples, pink, 2 blues, yellow, red, Avengers Popsicle with a black tip, a clear white popsicle for blending, and a fudge pop.

I came up with this idea after a trip to the store where I noticed there was a crayon shaped popsicle. Later that day I saw kids with their mouth and tongue stained blue from eating popsicle. There aren't a lot of foods that are blue in color so this really stuck out. That night I dreamed I was painting with popsicles and when I woke up it seemed very real and possible. I rushed to the store and bought every type of popsicle there was, but it wasn't until weeks later that I got around to trying it.

I though it would work something like watercolors or layering transparent thinned oil paint. I picked out some colors and tried making marks on some scrap sheet of Arches watercolor paper.

You can see my test sheets on facebook.

The watercolor paper wouldn't absorb the sugar water from the popsicles and the colors were really light. I figured out I could make gradients with the help of paper towels. Adding layers darkened the colors up and allowed color mixing. Once the popsicles melted the stick was a tedious way to do some fine detail work. Since all the popsicles were transparent it was difficult to make dark colors and black. Then I remembered fudge pops, they are opaque, and worked perfect as a foundation for layering up to black. The main problem was that the paper warped a lot and the popsicles took forever to dry so the liquid would run. The colors also shifted and changed as they dried, but it seemed possible.

For my real attempt I got some thick watercolor board to stop the warping and jumped right in. It was fun rushing to get color down before the popsicles melted. Before long the whole paper was just a giant puddle of popsicle goo. Layering on colors stopped working and the puddles started running and dripping. I had to take a break and let things dry up.

It took forever for it to dry. When it finally did I jumped back in. I was able to layer over the dry stuff fine at first, but then I noticed it would just reactivated the old layers. This was good because I could erase a couple of mistake but then the problems started to mount. I hadn't notice but the whole watercolor board was warped and rippling. The colors really started to run. On the peaks of the ripples the colors would really wash out. I got really frustrated trying trying to keep the drips from going where i didn't want them. My attention became obsessed trying to fix the drips and gooey blobs of color. I ended up losing sight of the big picture and went a little too dark in places. I overworked it and there was no way to fix it so I quit in frustration.

Later I looked at the video and saw that some of the things I was obsessing about didn't even factor in the big picture. I wish I could have stopped myself a few seconds before then end of the video. I wish I could have used more patience and allowed it to dry. I wished I didn't over work it.

Have you ever overworked some art or wished you would have stopped earlier?

In the end I was using popsicles for the first time and it could have turned out much worse. I might even try using popsicles again.

Royalty Free Music by http://audiomicro.com/royalty-free-music
Song: "Now and Forever"
Artist: Rhett Nelson