Gesso Etching Technique

I've been playing around with this technique this week that I learned about from Claudine Helmut. It's a fun way to make your own background page for a layout or project.
What you do is take a canvas or piece of fabric which is was I used, and first layer it with some paint, all over the surface.Let it dry. Then you take gesso, which is a primer for all types of surfaces, and layer that on over the paint. Let some of the paint come through the surface. You can add several colors if you want, I just used yellow paint for mine.
I put it on rather thick and if you are going to use it for a background for a photo or something, you might want to put it on thinner. Once the gesso is on, I took a pencil and just drew my figures onto it. You can do whatever you like to make the background you want. Her example was to do a type of faux cursive handwriting which was quite cool looking. Let it dry thoroughly. Now you can use the page as is or if you hadn't let the gesso dry, you could use a transfer method on it which I'll explain next time!
Have some fun with it!