Washers and Clingfilm

A few weeks ago Anna offered to send out some washers and/or buttons to anyone who asked for some. Her only request was that she be sent an ATC in return which incorporated a few of the washers and/or buttons.

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I decided to join in with this challenge and my washers and buttons duly arrived. I thought initially I would use the washers as a resist on some fabric and used silk paints to colour some voile and cotton fabrics.

I made a mistake on some of the fabric and painted the whole fabric before placing the washers down, but on the piece above I put the washers down and applied the silk paint to the fabric around them. I also sprayed the piece with water to help the silk paints flow.

You can see in the photo above what happened when I painted the piece before placing the washers. I also used salt in the paint and I really liked the effect it gave me.

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For Anna's ATC (which she should have received by now) I decided to use the middle piece of voile in the photo above.

This is the resulting ATC. I painted the washers with Alcohol inks (I found some of these rubbed off while I worked on the hand sewing). The base for the ATC was a piece of this Lutradur which I had worked previously. I used a soldering iron to distress the surface of the voile after I had tried to melt it with the heat gun to no effect.

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You may remember I mentioned last week a technique for working with cling film and inks and promised to show the results of my experiments here.

I started by damping the paper all over and applying two or three different yellows to provide a base for what I hoped would eventually resemble hedgerow/foliage and the pic above shows the paint manipulated with the clingfilm. I sprayed water onto the inks and added more drops of ink until I was satisfied with the effect and then placed heavy books on top of the clingfilmed paper overnight and peeled the film off the next day.

Here the clingfilm has been removed.

I applied some darker inks and repeated the process with clingfilm and weights overnight. Once this layer was dry I repeated the whole procedure again.

This is the final result. It is a little darker than I had hoped but I think there would be several ways of using this in collage or as a background. It is as well open to a change of orientation. The photographs do not show it very well but there is a sheen to the finished piece.

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I've been out playing at a workshop today but I'll save that for later as I need to cook dinner now. Hope you're all having a good Saturday and haven't got too much snow in the UK yet.

Jan Osbond and post

Today has been our weekly Art Group meeting and we have been treated to a demonstration of mixed media painting using tissue and texture mediums by the wonderfully enthusiastic Jan Osbond. Jan works in both watercolour and oils (separately) over texture mediums and more often than not uses her fingers to paint with instead of traditional brushes.

At the moment Jan is doing a lot of work in black and white so she worked in monochrome for the purposes of the demonstration this morning. I have done quite a lot of work myself with texture mediums and tissue along with many other materials to provide texture but it was interesting and inspiring to see Jan's work. Most of all she opened my mind up to the thought of working with watercolour pigment straight from the tube, straight onto the paper, applied with the finger. She then manipulated the paint with water, stroked on with her fingers to pull out the paint and create edges or soft areas. The paintings you can see above (sorry they're a bit blurry) were done in this way. The texture mediums were mostly used in the lower part of the painting and included tissue, (which was stuck down as one piece on pva and then manipulated to suggest rocks, black flint medium, sand texture medium and glass beads texture medium. Ideally you need to think about what effect you are hoping to create (eg foreground vegetation, seaweed, rocks etc) when you initially put on the textures.

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The other technique which intrigued me involved applying inks to wetted paper, quite randomly apart from colour combinations, and then putting clingfilm (saran wrap) over the surface. Jan then pushed the clingfilm around on top of the paint until she was happy with it and left it to dry under a weight. Ideally you would leave this to dry overnight. The next step would be to peel off the clingfilm, re-wet the paper, reapply inks, cover again with clingfilm and dry again under weight (heavy book would do). You can repeat these steps several times until you get the result you're pleased with. Jan uses this method to achieve leaf shapes and suggest foliage. You also get a shiny surface with this method. I will certainly be having a go at this technique and will blog my results as soon as I've done it. Watch this space!!! lol

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The post today brought me not only the latest issue of Stitch magazine but also 4 ATCs from Lauren as part of a 4 Elements swap at the MixedMediaATCs_UK Yahoo group.

Clockwise from top left the cards interpret Water, Earth, Wind and Fire. I think Lauren has worked in pastel pencil to make these lovely delicate ATCs. Thanks Lauren :)

The afternoon has seen me fight my way through a pile of ironing so my to do list is not getting any shorter! My house and studio are both/all in total chaos so the weekend is hopefully going to see me restoring a little order as I can't function anymore with all this "stuff" (not forgetting the dust bunnies!).

Evolon

I finally managed to get to our monthly mixed media workshop/playday today having missed the January session when my DH was ill. I didn't achieve anything concrete but I did have a play with some Evolon which I bought recently from Rainbow Silks. This is a new product, said to be similar to Lutradur in that it is paintable, printable, sewable and probably a few other -ables too! It does feel softer and denser than Lutradur, more like a fabric.

I decided that I would use acrylic inks to colour the Evolon with and sprayed water onto the fibre to dampen the surface.

This is the surface when wet and with inks squirted on neat from the dropper. As you can see the ink was very reluctant to move even when sprayed with water. I did try and spread it with a brush and water to close some of the gaps but I think it would have been more successful if I had diluted the ink in the first place.

I don't think there is much difference to be seen between this dry sample and the wet version.

This is the reverse of the Evolon when dry. There are some attractive textures here I think.

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I did cut some samples from the sheet of Evolon that I had painted and subjected it to the heat gun but with very limited results. In fact, the fabric barely altered at all. I would like to have a play with it with a soldering iron as we did find it was possible to cut out shapes with it but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the tiny bit we did. Oops!

The above photo shows some oilbar (Shiva paintstix) rubbings on Evolon over rubbing mats. the black shape in the middle was done with a Neocolor crayon which of course is not water resistant.

This time I diluted the inks and then brushed them over the oilbar rubbings. Even though the ink was diluted you can see that it was still reluctant to blend. The ink/paint seems to stay where you put it and not migrate through the fibres.

The photo above gives a closer look at the surface of the Evolon.

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Obviously I have barely scratched the surface of possibilities with this fibre and when I get chance I will experiment further.

Footnote: I have just Googled Evolon in images and have been linked to Carol Clasper who has blogged about her own experiments with Evolon last year in a much more extensive way than mine. If you click the highlight of her name you can read all about it.