Tag: recycling

and up to date!

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.

dyed paper things

When I was doing my paper dying some weeks back, it was without any real plan as to what comes next. Then last night I found myself making these.

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There’s about 125 of them at last count, and already a few have found a home on today’s page a day page (more on that later!)

confessions of a color junkie

Can’t help myself, every day gotta get a fix of colors. Colors in combinations that don’t always sit comfortably. Colors in big splashy forms. Speckles n freckles you only see close up….

happy accidents in colors

I’ve been dying threads and fabrics for a project I’ll show you soon, and in turn I’ve had some happy accidents I think you might like.

Here are the dyings…



Having given them a good long soak in procion dye I left them to dry out, and naturally didn’t want any off the delicious color juice go to waste. So back to the fruits of the paper dying project


The cord made especially interesting tigery patterns



Sometimes the pigments react, separate, and make wonderful patterns

serendipity

Serendipity [noun] “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.”

I think this sums up so much of what I do. Yesterday’s post about recycling was a tangent I wandered down when thinking about how the collage pieces I make come into being.

Paper is readily recyclable these days (indeed it’s often recycled when it’s ‘new’) but I like to get every last ounce of use out of it. Once it’s been printed on (both sides) with info that’s no longer needed, it retires to a life in art.

Images and pictures, blocks of color or gradients, maps, poetry, lyrics, photos, scanned doodles and sketchbook pages, mish-mashed up in photoshop, I let fate take over and set the printer running. And if there are gaping spaces left, the page gets turned around and over-printed again. Serendipity occurs!

The ones that don’t happen into something immediately usable cover my work table to take on new nuances with splashed color, and as testing grounds for paints and inks and stampings. Or used to soak up excess color from dying fabrics and threads (I think this must be where the great paper-dying project originated… one idea bears fruit and blossoms into new ideas and schemes and badly mixed metaphors!)

the life cycle of a shirt

I’m an avid recycler. I was brought up before recycling was so easy – we have regular collections of waste paper and glass, not to mention the big bins to deposit unwanted plastic, aluminium foil and textiles in carparks and the such. But I was taught not to be wasteful from the youngest age. Be imaginative and think what something can be repurposed into.

A shirt has a life-cycle after its time as a shirt:

Unwashable stains? no problem for a decorating shirt. Brushed your elbow on the newly painted gloss paint? is still ok.

It becomes a gardening shirt. One sleeve gets caught on brambles and ripped? We really don’t care. Like a snake sheds its skin, a shirt sheds too, and leaving in its wake floor cloths and rags for mucky cleaning. Servicable scraps are useful for textile projects and test stitching and collage and patchwork (and more!).

Even the littlest cloth bits feed the clean rag-bag for snipping up into stuffing for cushions, made-up animals and all manner of stuffables. (I find snipping is as theraputic as it is productive, and goes well with TV or radio listening)

Buttons are harder to destroy through overuse, but will come off and be reusable in a future something.

Oh yeh, and that wholesome feel of self-satisfaction? you get to keep that for free! 😉

Mesh Mess

Y’know that sticky mesh tape stuff you stick plaster board together with? Yeh, sure you do! Here it is… It’s meant for healing up wounds in walls n ceilings, but I have a much better use for it.
Made from fibreglass it’s super-tough and water resistant, and the tape has just the right ickiness to it. If you’ve seen my last few posts you’ll know where I’m going with this…


It makes for excellent griddy stenciling and painty fingers!



Close ups….

Frisket stencils, part 1

I do love stencils, and after watching this vid from Julie Pritchard and Chris Cozens I was inspired to follow their technique using my own stencils. (I especially like the way they recycle the colors from the stencils onto tissue paper to reuse later on in collages)

So, I got myself some Frisket Film (if you’re shopping in the UK I can recommend Artifolk.)

Frisket is a low tack film that can be be cut to shape with scissors or craft knife, made especially for airbrush masks. (although I’m not air brushing, I’m using a spray bottle with dye.)

Used on a flat paper it sticks just enough to withstand leaks and dislodging, but on the bumpy lumpy surface of my sketchbook page it doesn’t have enough ‘cling’ to make a completely water-tight seal, but I’m happy with this – where the color oozes under it makes for a deckled edge to the stenciled lines.

Building up the layers is a lot of fun!

Dabbing the puddles of color to soak up excess liquid keeps it (slightly) under control!)

After letting it dry I added a couple more Frisket shapes, re-sprayed and a sprinkling of Brusho powder.

Check back later and I’ll show you how it developed from here!

lost in pages of color

it’s been over a week since the last round up of daily sketchbookery, here are some of the last week-and-a-bit’s additions…

Scraps of  dyed paper are beginning to crop up

I’d been hunting through old magazines for some silhouettes to use, I’ve a feeling these might make a few appearances in pages to come.

The faces were cut out from some over-printings (more on this later)

If I had to choose a geometric shape, I would choose the circle.

These doodlings are a form of meditation.

the words themselves are unimportant

The pen walks around, and my bitty thoughts are released.


I’ll add some more later 😀 Thanks for looking

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