Acrylics

I haven't painted in forever. It. Was. FUN.

(acrylics on cradleboard)

Sketchbook Project Update

I've been spending a lot of time working on my journal for The Sketchbook Project. My theme is "Lines and Grids". I don't remember when I've had so much fun with small-format collage art.

I know there's been some controversy about the quality of the moleskein journals which were sent out for this project: the binding is simplistic; the paper inside the journal is lightweight and too flimsy for wet media; and worst of all, the pages are perforated, thereby nearly assuring that they will wish to exit the book at some point in the lifetime of the journal.

I took these properties as challenges, rather than viewing them as "problems", feeling that my task as an artist was not only to create my own interpretation of my chosen theme, but also to make sure the book is archival. This is, after all, a public library that's funding this amazing project, and libraries aren't generally known for possessing extravagant budgets.

With that in mind, I've been reinforcing the binding and covering the perforations by adhering a strip of fabric or paper directly over them, right down the middle of the spine between each 2-page spread. It gives me an excellent opportunity to bring together artistically both sides of the spread, which has always been one of my goals, anyway.

I've been using only original images- in the form of sketching, stamping and screening- to create each page seperately and then I collage them into the book.

The collages contain both fabric and paper, as well as random materials like dryer sheets and deli paper.

Because of the bulk created by making collages- sometimes on heavy substrates like watercolor paper, cardboard or quilt remnants- and then adhering them directly to the pages of the journal, I've had to sacrifice a few of the forty pages offered to us by gluing some of them together. I really hate to waste any of the paper, but this method has the benefit of adding strength (and hopefully, longevity) to the pages.

I have a few more 2-page spreads to finish, but for the rest of this week, my journal is going away so I can work on a few other things. Happy creating!

More Crafty Blasts Form The Past!

I was cleaning out storage cabinets in the studio today, making room for more stuff, when I came across these platters I made from wooden blanks, back in my paper-obsessed days. They held up in storage really well.

 12" diameter

They were made by ironing colored wax (crayons worked best) onto slick paper, crackling the wax after it had set, and then filling the cracks with a contrasting paint color (I was always fond of the shimmer Lumiere gave to these platters, so that's what I used).

(detail)

I'd smooth double-sided adhesive sheets onto the backs of the papers, cut them into piles of half inch strips and apply them- one by one, overlapping- to the platter blanks. Then I'd seal the whole thing with several coats of polyurethane. 

 18" diameter

The cool thing was that there was no priming of the wood necessary, first. I did, however, paint the underside of the platters, usually with the same color Lumiere I'd used on the papers. 

 (detail)

Lumiere when buffed into wood is really beautiful. Even though this is usually a very opaque paint, the grain of the wood still shows through.

18" diameter

(painted back and platter foot)

For a while I was also into making art with masking tape. Did you know that plain manila masking tape stains beautifully?? I found liquid acrylics most effective, but even craft paint did a great job.

 18" diameter

I covered the surface of the bowl with torn pieces of tape and then stained it phthalo blue. I constructed the face and the rays by tearing more tape and placing the pieces directly onto one side of a sheet of double-sided adhesive. I cut out the shapes with a craft knife, painted them, and then applied them on top of the background. 

(detail)

Then it got a few coats of poly, as well. I didn't have finger prints for a week, afterward- who knew masking tape could dry out your finger tips that much?

One more piece of masking tape art, just for fun.

 Ginger Tabby, 18" x 26"

(detail)

Happy creating!

Cosmic CS Collage

 

CS. NO.7, 2.23.10, 16" x 18"

Are the stars out tonight? Can you tell if it's cloudy or bright?

 

(detail)

These papers lend themselves to thoughts of the cosmos, and that's where I went this week. Yes, in my universe, some planets are oval-shaped.   

As usual, this collage was created using NatGeo magazine pages "melted" with CitraSolv Concentrate. If you'd like to know how it was done, you can check the most recent issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors, or go to this post of mine and scroll down about halfway.

The Dyed Silk Blahs

Well, sometimes when you goof, you do it on such a grand scale that it takes your breath away for days. That's what happened to me this week. But since it's a little depressing, we'll get to that last.

Last week, I saw a program on Ovation TV called Art Or Not? and in it, they covered an artist who worked with Shiva sticks on large canvases. He made tiny marks all over the canvas with the paints, using them like crayons and adding layer after layer of colors until the whole canvas was covered. (I wish I could tell you the name of the artist, but I don't see it anywhere on their site.)

I was inspired and thought it would be a neat technique to try with fabric, so I wacked off a large hunk of white muslin, pinned it to my wall, and drew on it.

 

36" x 52"

(detail)

It was an awful lot of fun and while I don't know what I'll do with it, yet, I'm sure I'll be able to find something neat it can go into. 

I did another kind of crazy thing this week- I used a piece of breakdown printed fabric and one of my "melted" papers from my CitraSolv/NatGeo collection (to find links to this technique, please see the left sidebar for the link labeled "CitraSolv Concentrate") to create a quilt.

 

 12" x 24"

I adhered the paper to the fabric with a very thin coating of gloss medium applied to the back of the paper and then, when dry, ironed to the fabric. It has a nice, soft hand, despite using gloss medium. 

I was really pleased with the "tunnel" stitching I did on the top of the piece. 

 

(detail)

It gave it a great texture, I think.

Also, this weekend, I negotiated a solo show for the month of May at a Houston business, a restaurant called Mo Mong. I've done these shows before- in fact, I spent three years curating such collections for several different businesses- and quite frankly, I swore I'd never do it again. However, this is a very high-profile and busy restaurant, and the owner asked for my work sight-unseen, which was flattering. I'll let you know how it goes; hopefully I can sell some of my pieces!

So, onto my silk blahs...

A very expensive batch of veils arrived last week, along with twelve pots of acid dyes. The idea was to parfait-dye them in a large vat (bucket) with all twelve dye colors thrown into the mix. For those of you not familiar with parfait dyeing, it basically means to LWI dye by scrunching a piece of fabric into a tall, narrow jar, pouring in one dye color (I always start with the lightest color, usually in the yellow family), scrunching another piece of fabric into the jar on top of the first piece, pour in another color of dye and so on until the jar is full. Batch and rinse as usual.

I had it in my head that I would do this with large silk veils, but first did several different experiments until I was happy with the results.

Unfortunately, those experiments didn't really help with the mess that was to follow when I did it on a grand scale. My dyes clotted before they could be poured onto the silk, the silk refused to scrunch enough to get even the slightest patterning, and the dye, rather than blending on each piece in a nice melange of colors, refused to blend at all, so I got several red veils, several blue, several green, etc. I didn't even take photos. They're not unattractive, just boring as hell.

This week I will try to spruce them up with some screen printing and fabric painting and if that is successful, I'll be sending them to Lynn Krawczyk, who has generously chosen Art Now For Autism as her designated recipient of her annual Breaking Traditions fund-raiser this year. My scarves, if they turn out well, will be given to participants of the auction fund raiser as thank you gifts (and if they don't, I'll be donating some of my hand-dyed muslin, instead).

Look for this week's CitraSolv/NatGeo collage in the next couple of days. In the meantime, happy creating!

CS. NO6

 

CS. NO6, 2.16.10, 16" x 18"

This week, now that the sun has finally come out again, I find myself craving spring. So I just couldn't help but break out the spring colors for this week's CitraSolv/NatGeo collage.

The NatGeo pages were adhered to a masonite blank in my new favorite manner: I paint the masonite and the backs of the pages with gloss medium and once they're all dry, I iron the paper to the board. The heat of the iron melts the medium and the pages adhere flatly and smoothly to the surface of the masonite.

Then I broke out my spring leaf stamps. These stamps are hand-made by adhering cut fun foam to pieces of foamcore. I painted each stamp with titanium white acrylic paint to act as a resist to the wash of color that came next.

Once the paint dried, I washed the entire surface in Sun Yellow (primary) and Turquoise (also a primary) Dye-Na-Flow and then to seal it, I covered the whole thing in a final wash of more Sun Yellow mixed into gloss medium.

 

(detail)

Stitching, Mistakes, Lessons and CS. No. 5

This quilt critter got some of my attention last week in the form of free-motion stitching. My stitching over all was not too bad- not too great, either, but about what I would expect at this stage of my self-education. The stitching is ok- but the stitch choice and even the thread color choice were both pretty horrible.

21" x 29"

Not having had any kind of sewing or quilting background, I'm in the dark as far as guessing what type of stitching is appropriate for each area, and how to get stitching to help me tell my story. As a paper artist, when a particular design element wasn't working, or was more prominent than I wanted it to be, a little paint would push it right to the background and I could go on with my piece until it was complete. Not so with stitch lines.

It's going to take time to learn how, where and when to stitch, and what threads to use. I'm fortunate to have a good friend in snowy Canada, Elle, who has taken pity on my confusion and is flooding me with excellent information that will help fill in a lot of the gaps in my sewing education! Thank you, Elle!!

One incredibly important thing I did learn from this piece is that, for myself, the straight line stitch is far more fascinating. It leads the eye along on a trail of discovery. If I want a viewer to notice a particularly neat area of a hand-dyed or painted surface, a wiggly line heading to it and then playing around it will pull the viewer's gaze with it. Representational stitching on my own work, like I did with the leaf pattern on this piece, doesn't currently speak to me.

 

This piece has been constructed using only my own hand-dyed and painted fabrics. 

On other fronts, My CitraSolv/NatGeo Collages continue. I'm up to number 5 and I believe I have six more masonite panels to use up. 

CS. NO5, 2-8-2010, 16" x 18"

Once again, I kept the design simple because I wanted to play with tinting the papers with various mediums. Here, I've used both watercolor paints and fabric dyes to stain the papers once they've been applied to the masonite. 

Collage has always been difficult for me, I tend to agonize over every decision and have even walked away from- leaving incomplete- complex pieces I had worked on for months because I simply couldn't decide when they were finished.  Some pieces tell you, "STOP NOW!", while others will play cat-and-mouse with your muse until they exhaust you and send you away, bored and frustrated. Art is capricious that way.

The purpose of doing these collage is to try and break through my obsession with needing to over-analyze the placement, size, shape, value, color and relevance of every tiny element. I'll let you know if it worked when this series is complete.

My friends over at LQuilt have their forums up and running this week and I would love it if you'd come over and join me for discussions about fabric surface design, the tools we most love, and how to build your own stash of fabrics that you've created yourself, and any other subjects relevant to surface design!

See you there!

- Judi

No. 4 & A New Batch

This week I kept the Citrasolv/NatGeo collage simple and used only contrast to tell my story.

 

CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"

Because I don't want to use up all my WonderUnder on this series, to adhere this collage to its masonite substrate, I coated both the surface of the masonite and the backs of the papers I wanted to use with gloss medium. After they dried, I was then able to use my hot iron to collage the pieces down. 

I hit it with one coat of satin finish varnish to seal it. 

 

CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"

I've been going through a lot of papers to make this series and I still have six or seven re-purposed masonite pieces left to collage, so today, I melted another magazine. 

  

  

  

 

With this batch of papers, I learned from a couple of my previous mistakes and some slight adjustments yielded spectacular results. Last time, I got a lot of pages that were mostly black, and a lot more that all looked very similar to one another.

This time, I was more discriminating in picking my magazine- I sought one with a lot of brightly-colored photos, rather than one with darker photos and pages. Those dark, rich photos may look luscious in the magazine, but once the ink in them melts, they can become very black and indistinct.

The second thing I did, which took only a couple of minutes and, I think, made the biggest difference in my results this time as compared with the last, was that I went through the magazine first, page by page, and removed all the pages that had a lot of text and/or black areas. This helped to keep too much black ink from permeating every page in the melting process, and kept my colors bright and strong, and the patterning on each sheet sharp and clear.

Busy Week!

I got a lot done last week and throughout the weekend, so lets dive in!

I started the week LWI some inexpensive muslin with some excess dyes left over from last week's silk experiments.

Pretty boring except for this one piece, which took on a look similar to indigo.

 

Better quality muslin would- naturally- have yielded better results, but I had the fabric, I had the dyes, and I wanted to use it all up.  These lengths of cloth will be prime candidates for stamping, stenciling and other surface designs sometime in the future.

Next, I played a bit with discharge paste on some of my previously hand-dyed fabrics. I've used the paste in straightforward color removal before, but last week I wanted to explore using it to replace one color with another. I stamped, stenciled and screened both plain discharge paste and paste mixed with textile paints onto this piece of previously hand-dyed, dark gray fabric.

 

 36" x 48" 

I found that I preferred stamping the paste on, rather than pushing it through a stencil. Initially, the paste used through my stencil seemed to sit where I'd placed it, but over time it absorbed into the fabric and spread out, leaving me with large, white-ish blobs. Disappointing, but a good lesson- I suddenly heard Melly Testa's voice in my head from an old episode of Quilting Arts Tv: "Work very, very dry."

I finished that piece of fabric off by painting deep red curved and circular marks onto it and then dyeing it a deep rust color.

It's unsuccessful as a wholecloth piece, in my opinion- it's too dark overall- but it has some really lovely details in it, so it's likely I'll cut it apart one day and use it in pieces.

I switched tactics and fabrics and, following Melly's example of working dry (though she was using thickened MX dyes in her demo, not discharge paste), I ironed a freezer paper stencil onto another smaller scrap of hand-dyed fabric. I squeegied the barest amount of clear discharge paste over the stencil, making sure it was absorbed into the fabric before gently removing the stencil. This worked to give me crisp, clean edges.

What I found really fun, though, was the neat texture you can get when you "color replace" a second image on top of an image you've already discharged.

 

Here, I've stamped a 50/50 combination of discharge paste and transparent red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background. 

 

I chose these two colors to demonstrate the efficiency with which the paste works to remove the original color. If I had simply not used the discharge paste, and stamped red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background, the yellow would have nearly vanished and the red would have read as a muddy brown. But because the (green) color has been removed, both the red and the yellow read clearly for what they are.  

Here's another example of using discharge paste to remove dye from a hand-dyed fabric (this time in an earthy green) and replacing it with two other colors- yellow and turquoise...

Using discharge paste to create surface design is simple and effective, and is probably going to become a staple in my technique repertoire. 

Continuing throughout the week with more textiles, I did one last experiment dyeing silk veils. Once again, I cut two large veils into 16 pieces, soaked them in vinegar, wadded them into meatballs and froze them.

The results were again quite lovely.

 

I'm now ready to dive in and dye ten very large silk panels, parfait-style. Look for a post about those (and the reason for my sudden interest in silk) in the next few weeks.

And remember the down-and-dirty image of this piece?

It has now become this...

... and is getting both hand stitching...

... and free-motion machine stitching....

I hope to have it finished by the end of the week or sometime next week.

Tomorrow, look for a post about my CitraSolv collage, Number 4 and for details about my new association with LQuilt. 

Until then, happy creating!