I’ve been playing over ideas of barcodes. Visually, I love their zebra-patterning. Here I’m toying with the aesthetic nonsense they produce when ‘broken’. The warm analogue fuzziness contrasted by the unforgivingly On/Off-ness of a digital world. The fragments of the binary decay merge into the familar, natural.
Ingredients:
White Gesso
Assorted found barcodes
Drawing Ink
White watercolor
Palette Dregs
Coffee
last page!
Day 37. As summer has finally arrived in the UK the balancing cool blues refresh the eyes and the soul. It’s watercolor again today.
Day 38. A rummage through my box of ideas produced these photos of anonymous Victorian ladies, in the classically wistful pose of the age. Their eyes and details are enhanced with ink and graphite.
Day 39 More cool blues, a day tinged with sadness as I had to say a final goodbye to my long time furry friend, Woozle-cat. Which led to this outpouring of words.
Day 40. Oh how I love these colors! They lift my spirits and warm my soul!
Day 41 finishes this book, I’ll catch you up with this later on, and then we reach Book Three, which begins today!
Day 33. Water colors and inks, I like the dreamily muted colors, and again the upside/downside number thing.
Day 34 Doodles run free. This is the kinda page that I could keep on adding to but think I’ll leave it here for now.
Day 35. This is the kinda page that I did keep on adding to! Starting with that stencil again then with layers and layers of cut out scraps in a similar wavy spiral way.
Day 36 is a turning point, toward the original idea that each page would contain something of the feel of that day. This day I spent up in London with my friend, and bits and bobs from the day nestle amongst the usual doodles and collage.
Symbolic of so much, this getting back on track falls just 5 pages from the end of this book! But, as one book closes…
Day 30 is a watery page, dabbles and doodles in watercolor, with an unusual amount of white page left showing. The lettering is done with a Pilot Parallel Pen
Day 31 was a feast of color, explorations with the interaction of water and pigment, and some more chopped and hole-punched dyed paper
Day 32. There’s something luscious and decadent about purples and golds, or aubergine and ochre. acrylic paints and my newest fave fishy printing block.
Day 24. More slicing n dicing Here’s a thing I’ve come to notice, these oversized numbers. Featuring on most days, but not premeditated. Sometimes it’s a starting point, sometimes it’s a finishing touch, but they keep cropping up.
Day 25. Layers of acrylics and guache, and offcuts from another thing I’m juggling about with. Subtle in clear gesso, but still sizable numerals. In a more thinky moment I pondered their presence, accounting for it as a balance of order to the free fall chaos out there in the world.
Day 26. The 6 is cut from black gesso-ed thin copy paper and has a wrinkly plastic feeling. The numbers are both edged with scribbled mutterings.
Day 27. Some days consist of bits and bobs straying over the the recent past, culminating in something altogether ‘the same but different’, a familiar view from a new angle.
Day 28 In a mad fit of efficiency I recently sorted through all my colors – paints, inks, crayons, pens – into boxes of the same hue. Working in a small space means any space saved by putting stuffs away sometimes is revelatory. It also means that when the box of purples/pinks is out, then there’s a color theme decided until I’m ready for a change 😉
hey guys, where you been?
I’ve missed you!
….you were here all the time?
no way! It must be me then 😉
Time, tide and that other thing have been conspiring to keep me from your screens, but I return, and with bountiful supplies of recent pages! 😀
So without too much further ado…
Day 21 (thurs 5th July. Wow! big catch up!) The 2 shape really lends itself to swooping swirls and leafy shapes. The page is collaged together with left over shapes cut out from old projects for a different old project. Re-re-cycled!
Day 22. Look closely to see the “2”s, they’re cut from the plasticy remains of a laminated map. Soaked in water, the papery bit comes away without much of a fight, leaving a nice sturdy sheet of plastic stuff with a map printed on its underside. Top corners are wearing some of the ‘things made with dyed paper’
Day 23 The scaffold along the left edge is made up from the dyed paper, cut into strips and glued onto scrap paper into a stripey background. Sliced n diced, this across the stripes making new strips of little boxy segments. The right side border is made from these
Check back soon and we can catch a bit further up.
Meanwhile, I need to see what you guys have been up to! X
Continuing the catch up
Day 11 is an either way up day. I like these days the best! I did this with white oil pastel as a resist to the splatters and splashes of watercolor and acrylics.
Day 12. Watercolor again. Not in the delicately conventional manner with subtlety and fragile grace. No. Slopped on with an inch wide brush. And some more theraputic splattering.
Day 13 watercolors on a background of collaged torn up paper. Sprinkled with water for added dappliness.
Day 14 fell right in the midst of my obsessive dyed paper thing making episode. One side of the page is encrusted in left overs!
Day 15 has a paper mosaic running right across, then watercolor and ink sploshes.
Day 16. Zing! How these colors make me grin like a wide-eyed fool! Alternating between yellows and turquoises (watercolor and ink), splashes and drips, water swish, and speed drying with hot air dryer to chase the puddlings about the paper.
But who cares? it’s the journey that’s the fun bit, who cares where we end up!
The dyed paper things are growing and multiplying.
Mixy's Art Blog 