It’s been a while since I managed to sit down and create – I’ve been supervising renovation work at home and making tea every 90 minutes to keep the builders suitably hydrated. Rather than using a half inch paintbrush last week, I was attacking walls with a roller and emulsion. That’s left the room nicely decorated, but my carpal tunnel playing up.

Any hoo, last week a long awaited shipment arrived, including a set of Dylusions Paint by Ranger. Why on earth would I want yet more paints? They are billed as blendable acrylics, and they certainly do that. They come in wide jars, are quite fluid and smooth on beautifully with a foam blending sponge. The paint spreads thinly, but seems to be highly pigmented, so gives excellent coverage. It seems to have a little slow dry retarder in it, enabling the blendability which is excellent. That also makes the clean up easier as the paint was slower to dry on stencils and stamps. Thin layers on absorbent surfaces were very quick to dry. Subsequent layers took longer, even with a heat tool to speed up the process. Opacity in the main is good, with the white showing good coverage of the colours beneath. Also, a little paint goes a long way – each pot is likely to last a long time: all the stencilling on the image above was achieved with just the leftovers on the sponge. I’m certainly not disappointed with them, and will be introducing them to my art journal group sessions in due course.

Also never been used until this page: new letter stamps from Hero Arts – Kelly’s Shadow Letters and Kelly’s Bold Font, stamped in archival Jet Black and augmented with Signo white gel pen (thin and broad).