Rust painting

After collecting a number of rusty bottle tops for my erosion bundle it got me thinking. what else could i do with them? I decided to try making some kind of paint with the rust. Using eroded materials to make erosion art.

The first thing was give them a little wash

Once dry i then tried to make a paint/stain. The first thing i tried was scraping the rust off the tops using various tools which i would then try and grind down and water too. However due to only having bottle tops it was really difficult to get a decent amount of rust to scrape off.

After this failed attempt i tried something different. I decided to try painting lemon juice and salt on to the tops to try and lift the rust off directly. I first started by rubbing lemon juice on to the tops with a paint brush and then painting it directly onto my paper.

This wasn’t that effective to i started scraping at the tops with a craft knife and then brushing on the lemon juice, this seemed to give a darker stain. To push it even further i used a wire scrubber and gave the tops a quick rub over then applied the lemon juice. This seemed to give the darkest stain which i was quite happy with in the end.

Just a quick test piece i used the rust stain to paint the outline of the gower. the rust didn’t make the strongest colour but it could be nice as a way to age paper.

I also tried different things like painting a page with lemon juice then placing bottle tops on and placing a weight on top to ensure the tops didn’t move around. This made some really nice results.