Although that title implies that I’ve not been doing any, which would be inaccurate. More precisely, we now return you to your regularly scheduled life, sans major holidays for a while.
Over the hols I spent a wee bit of time playing with highly messy techniques involving glue, dyes, cheesecloth and tissue paper. It was one of those projects that I’d been wanting to do, but couldn’t really work on without John around to run Katherine interference. There’s no sane parent who would use permenant chemical dyes (which aren’t particularly healthy) with a toddler on standby. Not only is there the risk of being “helped”, but if a crisis strikes the kid, you really don’t want to explain to the nice emergency room people that it’s not blood, it’s red dye that you threw over the child as you wrenched them away from the heater/knife/poison/venomous snake/lava floe.
So I finally got a chance to play while John was on break. The process was pretty simple. You take a piece of flexible plastic (vapour barrier or a garbage bag will do), smear it with a mixture of glue (40%) and water (%60) and then lay two layers of cheesecloth over it. You then add more of the gloop (carefully) with a foam brush. The next layer is a piece of plain tissue paper that has been crumpled and somewhat flattened. Then more glue solution. Repeat until you have three layers of tissue paper interspersed with glue goo. Lightly spread gloo over the last layer of paper. Then taking dyes (I used Procion MX fibre reactive) and a syringe or eyedropper, splatter paint all over everything.
I tried fabric paints, but they don’t seem to work as well as dyes. They rest on top of the worksurface as opposed to dyes, which set right in. The paints also are less intense.
Anyway, after playing with blues and purples for a bit, I mixed some green and glooped around with it. During this process, I discovered that I could control the movement of the dye fairly well and was able to make outlines of coasts and shorelines. Working with some topographic maps of the coastline along which the East Coast Trail runs, I generally outlined the sections of shore surrounding the spout.
The pieces took about two days to dry.
Because the paper is reenforced with cheescloth, it doesn’t crack or tear. It can be sewn and embellished, as well as overpainted and cut without fraying.
I did a couple of test coastlines of nowhere in particular to use as trial runs while I experiment with the efficacity of various techniques for achieving desired effects. After that, my intention is to add details, landmarks, and relief to the spout pieces. I’m hoping to add borders of some sort as well, possibly containing landscapes seen along the trail as well as flora and fauna.
[...] On the design wall… Filed under: work, artwork, abstract-challenge — vickyth @ 9:17 am I finished (or almost finished) a couple of pieces last night. This first one uses that tissue paper/cheesecloth/glue/dye mess that I wrote about some time ago. I’ve been playing around with embellishing it and how it handles and I have to say, I’m impressed. This is titled “Stream of Consciousness” and, once again, is a mental meandering from the Abstract-Challenge group. A past theme of “music” triggered this work. It represents a stream and the way in which the musical sounds of a stream provoke introspection and contemplation. The beads scattered throughout are either bubbles, or the pricks of light in space, depending on how you want to see it. John said it looked like a nebula to him. It measures 8 1/2″ square. it’s a multi-media construction – paper, fabric and wool, embellished with Japanese glass seed beads and quited with metallic threads. The border/binding is hand-dyed wool from The Fleece Artist (can’t say enough about the superb quality and exquisite beauty of their work!). This piece is an older piece that I’d left in limbo for a year or so. I decided to finish it off and get it off the drawing board and onto the wall. It’s also an Abstract-Challengely themed piece for “cold” (or “winter” – I can’t quite remember. It’s sheers laid over hand-painted fabric in such as way as to suggest a landscape in winter. The infamous Camus quote (”In the depths of winter I realised that there was within me an invincible summer”) is written on one of the layers in the sky. Trapped under the snow are some broom seeds that my mother-in-law brought me back from Scotland (broom will grow anywhere – hence their suitability for representing the invincible hope of spring). I stitched the edge in hand-dyed silk embroidery floss. Right. Now back to the design wall for another round….. [...]
[...] These and other images from websites, books and slides have been filtering through my subconscious for some time now. I did some sketches of archways and lighting at one point, in an attempt to coalesce thought into image, but no dice. Those sketches are two or three years old now. So last night I was tidying my sewing table, working on another project and contemplating aerial photos and maps and their uses in images related to hiking, when I inadvertently laid a scrap cut from one project on top of a piece of paper/fabric/glue/dye stuff that I had made a while back and on whose potential I was busily ruminating. (The sparkly fabric was from some work I was doing at Christmas time and actually was destined for the garbage, but never made it quite that far.) [...]