Green – Page 2 – Mixy's Art Blog

Chapter Next: Mirage

Some the pages in my altered book are already conveniently titled. The book began as an orphaned volume of short stories, and some of the tales’ titles just appealed too much to cover up.

Doesn’t Mirage just conjure such magic?

I haven’t embarked on any of these pages with a plan. Planning just isn’t in my spirit. I didn’t get that gene.

So to begin I just do something, and let that define where it wanders next. The first something that happened on this page took the form of sprinkles of Brusho swept about in circles with a wet brush.

Oh my how I love how these dusty crystals explode with colour. This stuff is the definition of less is more. More than a wee bit makes for a super rich gravy of an ink, which is gorgeous, but when you use an imperceptibly itsy amount each tiny trace of this magic erupts into zingy pigment on contact with moisture.

It is more than gorgeous. It is actual magic.

Another early layer was gesso scraped through a stencil, then extra messy gesso scraped haphazardly. If you’re a fellow scraper of gesso you’ll recognise those characteristic windshield wiper patterns of clearing excess off the scraper 😉

In the years preceding this project I accumulated a shed load of design magazines, rich full of the most gorgeous graphics and illustration. Just lately I embarked on transforming the knee high heap into 4 boxes of delicious collage ingredients, and a small mountain of recycling.

Thing is, I don’t know who this half a face belonged to, and as an artist I’d like to credit the creator. Any reference to the inventor got lost in the snippings. If it was you – thank you – and I hope that you like the new other half I made. In the spirit of self-portraiture I’ve mismatched the eyes for a familiar wonkiness!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip through the putting together stages. Here’s how the page developed as a whole………

https://vimeo.com/128248696

deeper into the book of wishes

Yesterday I showed you the first page of my latest project – the first one I could call finished (ish).

This is the latest page, I began playing with over the weekend.

Starting out with gesso and inks, layered up and finished with hot glue blobs

Inspired by the very lovely and talented Contadina K

3 of 12

Todays snippings are from the spring to early summer and range from the violet edge of blue through to sunny yellows 😀

Easy Batik – the verdict!

Some little while ago I got all buzzed up about an idea to do some batik. A trawl through the web came up with Dylon Easy Batik and as I couldn’t resist (HA! geddit!!) giving it a go.

I have to say firstly, it is a lot of fun.

With the consistency of cream (shake well – I forgot one time and it does separate unshaken), it paints on nicely. I was using cotton sheeting, and found it absorbed and spread, so even the finest lines came out a bit chunky. In that sense it’s limited in comparison to real batik, but something to build into the design I guess. The other main difference is that unlike batik wax it is flexible when it’s dry, so none of that lovely crackle effect. But other fabrics need testing on!

First easy batik doodles!

This is the underside of a freshly dye-painted sample. The eagle eyed amongst you might notice the batik-stuff appears speckled. It isn’t. This only happens if you use a fluffy-with-velvet-trimming-fuzz-covered surface to paint on. Oops. No matter, it all comes out in the wash.

Now that leads me on to another thing. If one were to follow the instructions one would paint on the stuff and allow to dry, pref overnight, then iron to fix (did all that), then to place the fabric flat in the dye for 30 mins (longer and the resist loses resistance), not aggitating it for fear of loosening the stuff from the fibres.

If, on the other hand, one is me, one might choose to go off recipe at the point after the ironing…

I had planned to paint and drip procion dyes, swish with water, get a nice watercolory-effect then fix with soda ash per dying instructions on the bottle. Building up by layers, some more batik-stuff, more drying-ironing-inking cycle, etc…

But, surrounded as I was by so many delicious colored inks (not fixable), I ended up using a mix of procion dye (unfixed, didn’t bother since all the other ingredients became involved), ink, dylusions spray, coffee, tea…
It was a giddy whirl of color, it was really out of my control altogether. i just decided these samples would be ingredients for non-washable creations. Simple as!

But sometimes, just knowing something won’t work is not reason enough not to give it a try. After all that ironing a certain amount of fixing must have happened. Plus I knew full well if I’d been wearing white when I did this, no amount of laundering would have got the splashes out! So I *washed some edge snippings to see what happened… just how much color loss and more importantly, washability of the stuff
Surprised by the results – less color loss than I expected, and total stuff removal (speckles n all!)
*washing: hand washed in cool water, no detergent, just til the water ran clear.

the other side of the folds

The other side of day / page 40 had folds already in place from which to make structure.

These created rectangles in which to hold doodles.

It was another page that spilled into its neighbour, repeated shapes formed along the far edge along with inky grass-green spillage and over spray.

Coming together as a whole, like this.

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…

time marches forward

I was away for a couple of days, but the page a day project ticks along!

Friday’s page is here….

Being fascinated by mechanics, numbers and time, clocks are a constant source of interest to me.

Over the years I’ve often incorporated clock faces in art, and I thought it was about time I had one in this series 😉

I like the regularly spaced hour long segments, contrasting the unequally balanced chunks of time into which we split our days

An hour spent waiting in traffic is so much longer than an hour spent in the company of ppl we love. An hour of sleep is not the same size of time as an hour at work…

……………I’ll catch you up with the others in a bit 🙂

Jungle Jumble

Monday’s page spread into two (as they sometimes do).

12 in 12 to August (ish)

The 12 colors in 12 months project is ticking along in the background… I add little bits and things when I have oddments of the month’s color to hand. So it builds up.

To re-cap here’s where we left off in June, through to the first layers of August

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