Last night I left the marinaded paper ready to sweat by the rad…
Today’s weather has supported my efforts by being quite cold, justifying use of central heating to warm room as well as dry my doings from yesterday.
Carefully unpeeling the layers to get some air flow, I then sorted then into heaps to finish drying and admire
Next stage is sort the ‘finished’ from the ‘not quite there yet‘, iron the former and carry on playing with the latter.
With fabric and textiles, I’m rarely put off by material being the ‘wrong’ color, provided I can dye it. Lately I’ve expanded this reasoning to include paper too. Fortunately for the sake of this project I’d already squirreled away a stock of paper, and the only preparation to be done was some therapeutic tearing and scrumpling.
Some paper (tough brown envelopes, cartridge, wallpaper lining, and watercolor) will tolerate heavy handed roughing up. Tissue, copier, newsprint and (my least fave) sugar paper just don’t have the same endurance, but will survive a lower level of scrunch.
The purpose of this is break up the surface, the scar lines offer a more porous surface for the dye to bleed through, and sometimes give a nice batik-y result.And sometimes they don’t. But we don’t care, we’re just here for shits and giggles.
Let the messy stage commence!
Plastic tray, bit of paper, swish with water, drips of dye & ink.
From here it’s a matter of layering (thinking ‘lasagna’, but without the food elements. Srsly, that would be a whole different result, and not what I’m after here at all)
Thicker acrylic based inks work best thinned right down with water,acrylic acts as an adhesive and if/when used thickly will gum the papers together into an unpickapartable cludge.
Some layers through I like to give the soaking papers a bitova squish with a roller (brayer). The dye will penetrate the paper fibres better, and slop out of the edges of the tray if you’re not careful.
Sometimes I pour off a bit of excess wet into a jar and reuse it further up the ‘lasagna’.
See the batik-y thing going on? Yay!
Onward n upward, paper, water, dye, swish, squish, paper, color, swish, etc
Disclaimer: no books were harmed in this production. Apart from this one. (Second hand and out of date when I got it, 15 year old book on web site building. ) Just saying. Books are my friends, and I never deliberately dismember friends, even in the name of art. Except for the very dead ones.
Some hours later, tray filled, excess juice drained, the soggy lump of color gets tipped out onto something porous (I used a selection of my finest knackered tea towels) and left to dry by the radiator. (If time and climate allow, sunshine will do the trick too)
Oh, n you might wanna be wearing gloves for this. Or, like me, you might only remember this once you have dyed fingers…
As the book of daily doodles progresses, it must be time for another catch up…
As the days and the pages go by I’m seeing how there’s so much more to this project than I ever expected. And I’m not even 3 weeks in!
This page was play with acrylic tar gel and inks. The ugly scratchiness and clogs in places are more than outweighed by the fun in doing this and the lessons learned.
Dr PH Martin’s Inks have a delicious gloop to them. They make for good splotting and over-printing with a wooden print block. Adirondack dye ink spray has a fine mist sometimes a little spitty. Inky mist, spit and splot are the essence of this page.
Not truly done justice in the photos, but the effect of dripping the Dr Martin’s inks and swishing with a sponge when a little bit dried was too fluffy and gentle to draw over.
So instead, I drew around it
From humble beginnings, a new character is born. This page is seen through Eyebird View 🙂
This month’s colors in the 12 in 12 project, not the mood or music. I’ve hit the ground running into April’s new colour and already (day 4) have the beginnings of 4 pages to share with you….
I’m playing with cut-outs, I like the way it links the pages letting glimpses of the next and previous pages show through. The tiny diamond shapes have informed the way the patterns grow and develop through these four pages.
Detail here…….
Where some people see scrap, I often see ingredients.
Only when it really doesn’t fit with social expectations can I curb my collecting, but I will usually come home with something I didn’t leave the house with earlier in the day.
Leaves, paper scraps, foil and cellophane from sweets, sketches and photos of interesting shapes, patterns and textures; jotted words and phrases from the radio, books, internet or my own head. Findings!
Today I resisted the feathers I saw scattered on the verge as I walked to work. Thinking roadkill, bird-flu, infection, dirt. I saw more feathers, one was 7-8 inches long with a fluffy plumed edge and speckly pattern. Conscious of passing driver’s impression of a grown adult picking up and stashing litter from the roadside. More feathers, smaller but irresistibly velvety. Their owner must have come to an unfortunate end to lose so many clothes. Pheasant? (no corpse), idk.
Thinking aside, when I got to work there was, in my bag, a perfect, elegant, inspirational, new-to-me ingredient.
It wasn’t until I photographed it I discovered it’s a feather and a half!
It might be a subject to draw, a shape to photograph, to inspire. It might act as a brush, then retire to join one of many collages. When the time comes, it will be an ingredient in at least one something I make.
It also looks (to me) like a tiny porcupine with no face.
I’ve shared some little snips and bits of my doodlings with you over the last few days to introduce you to my projects. Today I thought I’d explain a little more of how some pages come about.
I advocate the belief that art materials can be made of pretty most anything. Beyond “making use”, “recycling” or other worthy intents, this is closer to a manic scavenging, edged with disproportionate glee, in discovering a source of free material that is unwanted by the world.
The basis of this page is a case in point. I work in an office, everyday there’s a delivery of interestingly patterned paper. Business envelopes.
Opened up, inside outed to see the squiggly abstract patterning, the best of the bunch get flattened and hoarded up for later.
I’d already dyed some envelopes, by layering them in a plastic tray (yup, scavenged from the kitchen) with dilute Procion dyes and inks in shades of blues and green. Purely experimental. Or just mental? Whatever, in their soggy state the pre-gummed bits re-gummed themselves to their neighbours. This page made use of the scrappy torn bits, picked apart shreds + the borders around the windows, (window frames?) deemed too bitty to save for future who-knows-whattery.
Collaging with Mod Podge, I built up a background for doodling on. Before it dried I added more color with little sprinklings of dry Brusho powder in gamboge, lemon and orange. Swishing with water got the colors to liven up a bit before being left to dry.
Layered up 3-4 deep in places, the overlaps and natural crunkling of the paper caused by heavy dosing with liquid, gave an undulating surface. Less camera-friendly (at least at the time of light I chose), but pleasing to draw on as the contours and furrows guide the lines on which the patterns build.
The doodlings take on a life of their own in a setting like this. Torn edges and inky tide marks sew the seeds from which the lines grow. The padded quality of the surface make biro doodles dimensional as the pressure of the ballpoint makes indented patterns. Marker pen sits on the surface and gives iridescent sheen at the right angle of light. Felt pens glide over the surface and make subtle marks.
Torn words grow new meanings, Private & Confidential became Obstinate & Conscious.
I’m typing this as today’s soggy goo of a page dries ready for an evening’s doodles to pull together it’s constituent parts (dyed scrap envelopes). I took some more pics of the days so far, in a bid to catch you up on the project. Current intention is to post daily from now on (day 3 n going strong!)
Meanwhile, here’s some more bits…
“a page a day keeps the monsters away”, as the old saying goes, and it’s just so true. When I began my latest sketchbook a week or so ago, I made an agreement with myself that this needed my daily attention. However little or much is available, everyday now contains some arty time.
So again with the show and tell, here are a few page bits:
True to form, no monsters here.
A week or few towards the end of 2011 I fell upon Marlene Glickman’s “Day by Day:Pieces of Life Series” which initiated 2 new projects. (The other of which I’ll type to you about later)
This a 12 month adventure taking shape as the year progresses. Ms Glickman set off my plan thusly:
“Making color and design decisions is sometimes difficult so I challenge myself to use only one color from the color wheel each month during my daily design exercises.”
From the start of January 2012 I’ve been working in new sketchbook, each month’s pages of doodlings and dabblings is limited to just one twelfth of the color wheel. Somewhere in each month I plan to upload my latests (and as I zigzag through the year, re-post the older months as they continue to develop).
Hold on to your hats folks, counting backwards we’ve got a quick 3 month round up….
So far the months have all spread themselves over four pages. Why four? no reason (three not enough, five too many…) Just saying, cos other months might ramble further. Guess depth and range of the colors have a bearing too. (sometime I might count the pages n do the math)
Photography is a stage in the process, it gives clarity, like looking through somebody else’s eyes. Clicky close ups to show the detail…
At the time of typing March is not quite through, a work in progress…
February as a month is done and finished, but its pages will still get periodic tweaks. That’s the great thing about making your own rules to the game (; I’ll re-post updates later on.
I began the year in the colors surrounding me, tones and shades of brickwork, cosy warmth, winter berries. From here I’m ambling backwards around the color wheel, journeying towards red at the end of the year.
So that’s where it all began, folks.
Just a few days and a new (blue) month begins. Check back for the next insighting extallment!
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