Dry brushing is a very simple technique: you just drag a brush with very little paint on it across the surface of your paper, leaving behind sheer streaks of color. To dry brush, you’ll need some acrylic paints and a cheap bristle brush—I usually use a large one for this. A good tip about brushes: always use the largest brush you can. For this technique, a smaller brush has to be reloaded with paint many more times than a larger one to get a full page covered.
This really shows up better on my black test piece than the finished book sample—that’s because the paint I used for both is gold Lumiere with a very bright shine to it. Any acrylic paint will work for this. The Lumieres are pretty dense, so to get my text to show through, I had to be very careful not to load too much color on the brush. I usally do this by pouring just a tiny bit of paint onto a styrofoam plate, dabbing my brush into it lightly, and then dabbing it directly onto the plate a couple of times to leave some paint behind before applying to my surface. This is a technique that takes a little practice, because too much paint on the brush creates a very dense application, while too little creates uneven streaking.
