Category: ingredients

obsessions de jour

Hey folks – Happy Holidays to you all!

We’ve had a lot of dark, gloomy, rainful days here. Not a big grumble, weather happens, but the half-arsed grey wet daylight has severely hampered my ability to any good photos lately. This week, finally I got a few pics of my latest adventures and obsessions!

When time and people permit, I like to pretty much hibernate from around 21 December straight through to a couple of days into January. Not so much a big sleep, but a big re-charge. I spend most of these days actively pursuing colors and shapes in some fashion or another 😉

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Recently I’ve found myself making a whole load of these. Srsly, like dozens of them. Ranging in size from about 1/2 inch upwards to 2 inches, they really satisfy the no scrap is too small to keep mentality!

To what end I can’t be certain, but I mounted a few up on some dyed paper and framed a few in little Ikea box frames.
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Some of them have a very dimensional quality – consisting layers of paper and some with corrugated card – so they work well in a deep box frame. (pics to follow…)

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Hang on… like a deja vu thing going on here… these things remind me of something…
Yes! these things
Curious… I’d totally forgotten about them til typing this post… But do feel encouraged, at least I’m consistent with my obsessions, even if I’ve no idea what they’re for (yet).

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So, dear friends and visitors, whether you’re getting ready to party the new year in, or already have done, I wish you all the very best for 2013.
May it bring you what you wish for, and more 😀

Eph X

words and colors

If you’ve visited here before you’ll have to noticed two of my favourite things are words and colors.

So dying a dictionary seemed the obvious thing for me to do.

Flamboyant through to Flat, multiple ink stains

30 years ago this month I began high school.
Plea to Plough

30 years ago? Lordy!

ink soaked paper napkin squashed between Shun and Side

Equipped with the essentials dictated by the school, I now owned a Pocket Oxford Dictionary.

from Irk to Irresponible. Coffee painted on with teabag.

(At over 1000 pages and a good 2 inches thick, the average pocket size of an eleven year old child negated its title.)

Lure to Machine. Dripped inks and dye water.

Nonetheless this book has travelled with me through the decades.

Abbreviations to A. Squished inky paper

Repay through to Reproach. More inky goodness.

Battered, dog-eared, with scribbled notes in the margins here n there…

from Pylon to Quandry. Squashed strip of inky paper

… the spine went first but now it’s cover has separated totally from its papery wordfilled heart.

dip dyed dictionary

In it’s new incarnation – a colorful version of the former – it will one day become collage ingredients.

Encode to Engine. Colorex inks

As an aside, I sometimes catch a glance of myself in my art room, as if from an outsiders perspective. I’m ironing torn, stained scraps of paper. Phrases like ‘not doing anyone any harm’ in bemused but sympathetic tones echo in my head. I smile. They just don’t understand. Anyway, I do it cos I have to and it makes me happy. Nuff said.

never say never (ever)

If there’s one thing that will motivate me into action, it’s being told that I can’t do something. Even (or especially) when the person doing the telling is me.

In reaction to a phrase in my last post “When space limits me to work on just one project at time…” Uha, really? I went on “… working within the parameters of my living/painting space, I have to exercise a little more self discipline…” I have to what? Says who??

ink drips on handmade paper

Working on small (8″ x 10″ and smaller … often scraps) scale, there’s really no excuse, there’s no ‘no space’ that can’t be remedied with a small amount of putting stuff away!

Opaque white ink dropped into puddles of transparent colored inks, left to flow.

Settled with a selection of old doodles on watercolor paper, some bottles of ink and water; and the giddy enthusiasm of new colors, I soon had a small dripping/drying/oozing/dribbling production line set up.

Aided greatly by the way I work – splashy and messy – no harm can come from cross contamination and minor spillages.

In fact, I ended up using the least soggy works to mop up some of the more puddly over waterings

drips of ink, then water, then ink…etc, wet on wet + wet on dry

Release from these self imposed boundaries!

inks dripped onto wet threads draws up the pigment leaving outlines. Highlighted with stitching (recycling that thread!)

Jam Jar Art

Have you ever noticed the underside of a *jam jar?

Me neither… until by happy accident. I checked all the old jars I have collected up, and they all seem to be the same. (I’ll wait here, you go off to the kitchen if you need to check yours now)

They all have a ring of raised dots – like glass Braille – I guess an anti-slipping thing.

Turns out if you wash out a jar and instead of drying it, leave it to dry naturally on the nearest flat surface, like maybe an inky page of an open sketchbook, a beautiful ring of dots appear where the water has run down the sides and puddled round these dots!

Oh yeh – and if you get carried away trying to recreate the effect you can obliterate the dot circles just as easily with too much water!

The patterning reminded me of sewing machined lines (unthreaded needle, just perforating the paper) …that seemed like the best thing to go with the page in progress

So that’s what became of page 36!

* strictly speaking mine are all coffee, mayo & pasta sauce jars. I don’t like jam. Funny how they’re always called jam jars…

scrap-driven pages


Working in the way I do generates a lot of scraps and offcuts. There are days (most of them) when I have no idea where to begin or how the page will look. The scraps often decide this for me, and Day 33 is pure 100% scrap driven!


Along with the scraps I make there are scraps I save from the ‘outside world’ – labels, tickets, lists and quotes written on the backs of envelopes… these were the founding ingredients for day 34.

The quote that I made annoyingly illegible was from an unknown Sufi master: “May I overcome any bitterness that may have arisen because I was not up the magnitude of the pain I was entrused with”. Hearty food for thought.


Scraps make for textural interest too, in page 35 I used little torn rectangles to build up a layer of white on the blank white page, that’s where the linear forms began and the rest just happened!

a day in a page, part last.

The disparate parts of today’s page are beginning to merge and sit comforatbly in each other’s company.


The only things we need now are the doodles

Light and Dark – Black and White – We Need To Doodle!!

…………………….and now to bed! G’night all X

a day in a page, part 3b

Sorry folks, unkind to leave you dangling.

Dangling?

Yes! Here – on the brink of painted catastrophe!

….daubing and splashing… still no idea where this is going now…. it’s just so busy, so freeform jazz, so focus-less.

Enough! cries IK. I need new and I need different! I need solid edges and flat color! I need Spots!

If only the page weren’t so darned soaking wet…..

…aided by dabbing with a scrap of dyed paper drying time elapses…. (time to type to you) …we wait

still not what you’d call dry, but enough to stick stickers, and a bit more paint…

Time for the papery things we made earlier. They want some more blending in… but that’ll be after some more drying time. Til then…. 😉

A day in a page, part 2 of part 2

Remember the fantastic ink squirting device from earlier today? Well here it returns but with even more ridiculous proportions. We needed red instead of yellow, which meant draining the yellow out of the squirty-bit. Never wanting to waste color, we released the residue onto tomorrow’s page.

Tomorrow’s page was temporary resting place for the palette we had lined up for later – (clear plastic box lid). No other space for it, so plonked back down on the puddle of ink.And wow! Happyaccidental art!

Look! It just happened!!

These pages are now both very soggy.

So it kinda didn’t matter to get a bit more soggier still… cue: coffee dregs. (Such a shame to waste)

Proper drying time now needed. I have to say, at this stage all I know is this is way off finished. It could absolutely go in ANY direction and I wouldn’t be surprised. Check back soon-ish, I’ll show you what comes next 😉

Happy endings

Ingredients:

  • Paper. I can recommend a HP940C printer manual, but guess anything made out of paper would do just as well 😉
  • Procion dye. Super vivid colors. I used Magenta and Yellow.
  • Brusho. (Or any ink). I chose Brusho for it’s intense colors
  • Spray inks – like dylusions or Ranger color wash. Or any ink in a spray bottle
  • Water – spray bottle or brushed on to merge colors
  • About a week for inter-page drying and adding ink/dye to the uncolored bits. Building up the colors in stages prevents murky colors
  • Sunshine and a washing line for quicker drying (optional)
  • Suspended expectations. This project steers itself!

Here are some of the results…….

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(More on how this came into being here)

re-inkification

Remember the thing with the wet scrumpled tissue paper? And the thing with the printer manual?

So I guess you know where we’re going from here!

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