Dreaming Spirals

I layered the collages a bit more yesterday - I worked fairly quickly and improvisationally because I was sitting there umming and ahhing and not actually glueing anything down so I decided just to get on with it and then see what I thought of them!

Here’s the blue one - I wanted to do something with leaves as I am so drawn to them at the moment.

I may add more or do something else to this one.  Not sure yet.

This is the one with the brown background.  I like this better in the photo than I did yesterday looking at the original!

This is as far as I have got with the green one but it isn’t finished yet…

I also made another background.  This uses some of the mulberry paper as well.

In the latest studio reorganisation I turned my table 90 degrees and put all the paints and related stuff into an old vegetable rack.   I like this.

You can see how much clutter there is on the ‘collage table’ at the moment!  Plenty of stuff to keep me going for a while!

And of course moving the paints left some shelves free for my ‘inspiration’ files and notebooks…

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I have got as far as the collage backgrounds with the tissue paper… I tore up various tissue paper colours and glued them with gel medium on to art boards.  Now I am going to watch the DVD again and add stuff (textured paper and found objects or whatever feels right to me) to the top once I have had a good look at them to determine where I want to go with them.  What Carrie Burns Brown calls ‘happenings’.

Here is another Picasa collage of the collages. 

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Here is a collage of some of the tissue paper I have been painting.   (I did this in Picasa, not in cutting and pasting real paper!    Not yet, anyway.)

This is a photo of some corrogated card which I painted.  It looks like a Picasa collage on its own!

And, a bit late, here is the best rusted piece from the baking tray which was up in the loft catching the drips.  It is ironic, really, because it is a practice piece on which I was trying to transfer a picture printed on Lasertran (not very successfully).. but I think it looks like one of those old medieval maps.  Pity I could never repeat it if I tried! 

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I read today in the local newspaper about an artist in Newcastle who had decided to make an artwork from all her junkmail. She has a spike outside her front door on which she piles it all! Apparently she started it on January 1st and it is now more than 5 feet high! Although I think if I took all my family’s junk mail, plus the catalogues I get sent from every company I have ever ordered anything - I especially hate the one which sends me stuff every month or so when I ordered something ONCE for my mum a few years ago - it would be quite a bit higher than that. I wonder if she is going to present it to the Post Office when she has finished?!

I bought a DVD by Carrie Burns Brown last week on Watermedia collage and have so far watched it about 3 times. And have been painting lots of tissue paper and other textured paper to make some collages…. I took loads of photos this afternoon so I will put some of them on the blog as soon as I have uploaded them to my computer. I think I have come to the conclusion that painting and glueing gets me creating much faster than sewing does. At least this year. And dyeing and surface design…. I have also been reading my copy of Jane Dunnewold’s book, Improvisational Screen Printing, and I want to try her interfacing stencils so hopefully lots of photos of that will be forthcoming! Children and other activities permitting….

I haven’t been getting many comments recently so I think I will go back to my old system of emailing commentators directly rather than on the blog. But I will leave the subscription plugin so you still have the option of getting further comments on a particular post.

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I found a great tutorial on screenprinting with paper stencils - I did this at college a few years ago when I screenprinted my Dennis the Menace window blind for City & Guilds, for my son Barnabas. Here it is:

I used newspaper to make the stencils for this because the image was so huge but I notice she uses freezer paper, which would be more durable. She has also posted a tutorial on using a Thermofax machine for those of you lucky US readers who can get them fairly readily! I have found a couple of people who sell either custom-made or ready-prepared Thermofax screens for people who don’t have access to one…

Claire Higgott - Thermofax Screens
Marcy Tilton

Let me know if you know of anyone else who offers this service. Thanks!

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We just got back from two weeks’ holiday in the Loire Valley, in France.  More later, with lots of photos (I just uploaded over 700 to my computer so I expect they’ll be popping up here for a while!), but meanwhile, Barb at Joggles has posted a Tutorial on using lutradur   which I thought a lot of you would appreciate.  It looks good and when I have time, I look forward to working through it and having a play too.

I will post the answers to my ‘what is it’ quiz in a few days - anyone else fancy having a go?  Thank you Mags and Elizabet for your answers - I won’t keep you in suspense too long!

Next week I’m off to the Festival of Quilts for the Personal Imagery in Art Quilts masterclass with Erika Carter and can’t wait!  Anyone else going to FOQ?  I’m going to be there from Monday night to Friday night.   Meanwhile, the washing machine is working hard because all the kids’ clothes has to be washed and repacked because they’re all off to camp next week too….

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I decided to paint the rest of the foam core today.  Here it is, sitting drying on a piece of baking parchment.

As you can see from these photos and most of the others in this blog, my main painting surface is the floor of my studio.  There is a perfectly good table for this purpose, but it is usually too full of other stuff like cutting mats, rulers, pens, pins, needles… you get the picture.  So the floor is the next best thing.  And so it will remain, no doubt, until my knees give out altogether.

When I was thinking of painting these this afternoon, I was looking idly at the piece of plastic I had used to protect the carpet while I was painting the foamcore, and realised that it was a pretty good work of art in itself!   Or part of one, at least.

So I decided to use some painted fabric as a dropsheet instead, and have the serendipitous marks of the black paint on that.  I wouldn’t try and control it but just try and forget it was there.  (A bit difficult, actually - I still think the plastic came out better but you can be the judge of that).  When I had finished painting the foamcore I still had a bit of paint left, only a smidgeon, but I decided to do some printing with the printing blocks I made with funfoam a couple of months ago.  Ulp, not a couple of months ago, it was February!! Crumbs… where does the time go?

Here is the ‘dropcloth’ together with some printing on it:

I originally painted this fabric back in 2005 and I have used a lot of it as backgrounds or backing fabric as it is quite stiff - it was painted with acrylics on polycotton fabric.  This was the first time I had printed on top of it.  

I still had a bit of black paint left in the palette so I grabbed some painted lutradur and got stamping away….

I haven’t used lutradur in any finished work yet but I really like the effect of this and the potential for layering because it is semi transparent.

I also grabbed a bit of yellow painted fabric and some pelmet vilene cut into postcard sized rectangles which I first painted during the online Personal Symbols course I did with Susan Sorrell last year - nothing was safe from the black attack!

I really like layering paint and dyes - I think it gives such a feeling of depth and interest.  No doubt these pieces will crop up in my future work  when I decide where they will fit.  But for this afternoon - I had fun!

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Cynthia St Charles has written a great blog entry on using plumber’s gasket material and carpet tape to make printing blocks.  She says that plumber’s gasket is a lot easier to cut than lino.  It’s worth reading just to see the great designs she has made with it!

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