Mixed Media – Page 23 – Mixy's Art Blog

papery things

The dyed printer manual has really got me thinking about all the other redundant paper lurking in the house and office – future dying ideas………..

All instruction manuals – speshly those ones relating to things long broken, gone or forgotten
Phone directories; the Yellow Pages would be a fab base for warm-colored dyings
Newspaper, magazines (but not the very glossy type – unless there’s time to give them a very thorough scrumpling to break the surface up)
Old bills and receipts, tickets, shopping lists, that kinda stuff
Paper bags

Added to previously explored and sucessfully played with……..

Old envelopes
Out of date manuals/instructions, insurance docs (they send me all this art paper every year!)
Diary Pages – the calendar pages, the lists of international holiday dates and all the extra stuff that isn’t actual diary & the unused pages!
Maps
Sheet Music
Misprints from the computer – y’know when it fails to feed the paper and you get the top inch on one page and the rest on another. Both of these!

Any more for the list? Yeh……there must be! All suggestions welcomed 🙂

This thing

The things with the dyed paper, the cut outs and torn edges, the outlining and the doodlings. The purple and orange thing that’s a little shiny in places. This thing here…

A page of plenty

Looking back and photographing yesterday’s page I can see quite how involved it was!

A crucial ingredient in the making of this page is insomnia. Extra long evenings are the best time for fiddly cutting, hole punching and sticking!

Being made up of so many papery layers the surface was pretty cushiony in places. This lends itself perfectly for biro doodling on. Some of this doodling was done with a biro that ran out ages ago, but didn’t get thrown out. The little circular indentations are made by the end of the lid.

Everything has a use in art!

So many, many layers

The page a day page/day parallel thing – they day resembles the page, the page resembles the day. Like the chicken and egg thing. Causality and whatnot.

This page went through so many incarnations.
Layer upon layer of indecisive confusion, unguided and unintentional.
Layers added, torn off, reglued on bits.
The page is quite dense and chunky now!

The day was complex, dense and chunky too 😉

Lime Green Swirls

Fragmented Binary

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

Plunging into book 3!

Here we go!

continuing the journey

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…

splash!

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.

purple ponderings

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 😉