Yellow-Green: Plastic Fantastic

As we begin a new month I’m stepping round to the next color in the wheel in the year full of color project. Twelvty this month is exploring Yellow-Green.

“You can do anything you want to do. This is your world.“
— Bob Ross

Like a lot of folks these days, I avoid using plastic as much as possible, especially the single use kind, but still it finds ways to sneak into my home and my life. This stuff can’t be recycled so I make sure as much of it as possible gets involved in my art making process before it’s inevitably binned.

And it was with this in mind I came across a new way to make painted surfaces uniquely pattered, and super shiny too!

I’m sure to be revisiting this way to play again, there are so many degrees of shininess, texture and thicknesses which make different patterns.

The first thought I had when I saw the effect in the yellow-greens is how like glossy leaves it looks. So just right now I want to dash off and cut out leaf shapes and collage me a big ole shrubbery or something. … But I must finish this post first!

It’s a super simple process:

A thick-ish layer of acrylic paint on paper.
A plastic or polythene bag laid out on the wet paint surface.
Smoosh and squish about a bit to stir up the color and get it to stick to the plastic.
Squidge it up in places to make little ridges and bumps and stuff.
Wait to dry (I left it overnight)
Gently peel off the plastic to reveal deliciously rippled surface and shiny bits.
I’ve saved the plastic to reuse again – some paint got stuck so I figure there will be interesting effects using another color with it next time . Watch this space!

This is how my first experiment panned out:

Every month this year I am making a series of pieces in just one color, so at the end of the year I can combine them into one big multicolored work.

I’ll be sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog.

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free! Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

You’ll get an email to confirm you’ve signed up and are human. Sorry, only humans (and their cats) can join. Check your spam folder cos sometimes the good stuff gets swept in there by mistake.

Yellow-Green: Surfaces & Texture

As we begin a new month I’m stepping round to the next color in the wheel in the year full of color project. Twelvty this month is exploring Yellow-Green.

“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.”
— Claude Monet

Yellow-Green

As we begin a new month I’m stepping round to the next color in the wheel in the year full of color project. In Twelvty this month I’m exploring Yellow-Green.

This is the first of the tertiary colors we encounter in our journey around the colour wheel: these are the intermediates, the not-really-one-nor-the-other.

When it comes to playing with yellow-green as a single color, it becomes like a dance between it’s color wheel neighbours.

watercolor & ink on gesso on watercolor paper

Painting on Texture

There are so many different combinations and ways to add color to texture. Here are some I like playing with a lot.

Gesso (clear or white), matte gel medium or white acrylic paint all make for a good base layer, and all give slightly different effects. Try covering the whole piece, or leave places bare for contrast

When this layer is dry you can add even more texture by crumpling and folding the paper, breaking the surface of the gesso

Do experiment – tell me which you like best!

I like to agitate the surface with a plastic card before the gesso sets to get those lovely tree bark patterns with peaks and ridges and organic wiggly, wavy lines.

I’ve had equally good results dabbing at the wet surface with a plastic bag. I shared a demo of this in a previous episode, but for this post we’re jumping in at the point where this is done, and the paper has dried.

Adding Color

The color I used was a very watery watercolor paint in yellow + green drawing inks (‘chartreuse’, ‘olive green’, ‘grass green’). Any water based color will work – I always advocate the use what you have principle – any yellows and greens that aren’t too blue-ish will work for this.

Version One: I gave the whole piece a wash of light, thin, watery color then added drips and drops of stronger color.

Version Two: Ink drips first onto dry gesso then watercolor dropped on top.

Lifting and tipping the paper side to side encourages the color to run around in the textured surface, so pigment settles in the valleys and shows up the patterns.

Where the wet color puddles I dragged it about with a paint brush, linking the pools together for the color to flow between.

Explore all the ways to hold and move the paint brush – left handed, right handed, by the very tip of the handle – let it hop and skip across the surface – try with eyes closed – twisting and flicking color about – dance the brush in time to music or a rhythm in your head.

Here’s how my first layers of color over gesso began…

Yellow-Green, ink and watercolor on gesso on paper. Layers on layers on layers!

Next post I’ll show you a way I like to use painted papers – especially the ones that haven’t gone the way I would have liked!

Every month this year I am making a series of pieces in just one color, so at the end of the year I can combine them into one big multicolored work.

I’ll be sharing my process throughout this adventure here in this blog.

I’d love for you to join me. TWELVTY is open to everyone, and better yet, it’s free! Sign up for my newsletter to find out more and get your free TWELVTY guide ebook.

Processing…

Success! You're on the list.

Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

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………

week by week 1/52

There’s something so deliciously enlivening about the start of a new thing

…a new year

…a new book

…a new project

In past years I’ve played with different art journaling projects, from page a day to a page a month. This time around it’s a page a week.

So, 2015, here we go!

Week 1 has been a painty brain-dump.

The only thing I had in mind to start was colour: I’m in a big ole red/magenta/turquoise vibe this week. Look at them ZING!

I primed the pages with gesso and began with some dollopy finger-painting. This process was fun but produced a textured surface so crunchy it really precluded writing with anything finer than a big soft marker. So the words are big n few.

I found some phrases through the week which stuck in my head:

Focus (my word for the year)

Let down your guard and Trust (I’ve read this in more than one place. So it’s a sign, right?)

Stand in your Light (I’ve heard myself say I’ve been standing in my own way a few times, this is a better place for me to be!)

Speak your Truth (it doesn’t have a meaning I can grasp at the moment, but I sense I might come back to this one later and see what I can’t see right now – ‘the woods for the trees’ maybe. What the hey, good solid advice.)

I wrote out the Holstee Manifesto. It’s mostly buried under layers of paint now. But I know it’s in there….the line “Some opportunities only come once, seize them” is just showing enough still to remind me: I want to compose a 2015 manifesto for myself.

Then there’s the three eye-fish. I’ll talk about them another day 😉

Meanwhile it’s day 7 of week1… I wanna get home and get my last bit of painting done for this page. I’ll post the finished version tomorrow.

Til then, g’night folks – sleep like kittens and dream of joyful things X

for the love of paper

Isn’t there something irresistable about paper? this page is centred around play with handmade paper. Not made by me I hasten to add – that’s a game I haven’t played (yet)!

It lends itself so well to roughly torn edgery, and as I discovered this week, tearing it when wet makes for even fluffier edges. Now I don’t remember what this paper is made from, it’s (I beleive) Indian and has super-long fibres. I painted it with Koh-I-Noor dye paints then gently tore it while it was still soggy.

The contrast on the magenta page really ZINGS!

I did the cut-out thing with a scalpel, the out-cut-bits then glued on top making multi-levelled layered shape, surrounded by doodle. With some more of the hairy edged paper and dyed envelopes glued to the underside of the page to show through the cut out holes, the next page was starting to take shape too. But more of that later.

Moments in the process

There is often a stage in the process where I look at the page and think WTF? What is going on? It might fly off on a tanget, or it might develop recognizably from here. But until it does, I have no way of telling…

Pushing on from this point gets easier every time. Like this…

Beginning the page with Black Gesso, some white writing and doodling. Tissue paper for texture.

Building up the shapes with slices of dyed envelopes

And some splashing – I used Dr Martin’s Bombay inks and some dilute acrylic paints.

And left to dry…

…to doodle on…

…and on…

to this! 😀

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

me and the inner kid had some chores this morning, but we tempered this by including a ‘raid the stationery drawer’ moment in the office (old sticky labels… MINE! semi-dryed up highlighter pens…MINE!. We got nice fresh walnut bread and bananas on the market, we got chocolate…

Back home to play! Now!

Texture demands IK. Any thing – don’t care what – I just need to tear stuff and glue stuff. Now!

Within easy reach of where we’re sat there are stashes of texture. There’s packing paper, cartridge paper (IK had been playing with a compass… so quite a few pages of pencil circles. Had a feeling these would find a use one day)

Strips of off-cut fabric and edges from stuff. A strip of hideous flourescent pink nylon net…

all those little snippings of thread… some, they’re like, less than an inch, little wisps.

We need Color!!!

See the cool ink-squirting device we devised?
(Yes, this is very top heavy and unstable. Yes, it would cause mess and possibly tears and swearing if knocked over. Proceed with caution. Thankfully we managed not to let this happen. The beast is dismantled and disarmed until next he is needed.

dripping with extra texture

Another part of the process with the now familiar printer manual: Scrumpling!

Both before and after the inky stage, scrumpling the paper helps it dry unevenly

Uneven drying makes for gorgeous textural effects.

With sharp folds the fibres of the paper is damaged just enough to make it super absorbant, and make for darker lines and patterns.

The inks run to and through the chanels formed by the creases

Reds n Ripples

For quite a shiny page, the close up shots don’t do the colors real justice, but I’ve included them to show you the lumpy bumpy textures. I really like the way paper goes into ripples when it gets wet (glue-y), and on this page I’ve highlighted the waves – although not sure it came out in the pics.