lots of leaves

Today's ATC happened in a round about way.
I had been looking at Julie Fei Fan Balzer's Blog and this post caught my eye. I have this book Scraptastic by Ashley calder, but haven't spent much time on it, so I  thought, why not?

This was one of the ideas in chapter 1.  Stamped molding paste.  I used an ivy leaf stamp which I have three sizes of.  The colour was scrapings from chalk pastels, which I brushed on, and then wrote the text with a fine tipped brush and some watercolour.  What I found was that it was easier to actually stamp the stamp in the chalk powder, then onto the molding paste, as I got a better image.

This is my practice page in one of my altered books.
And while we are at it, here are a few other more recent additions to these books.

This one I don't think is quite finished, but it has some interesting ideas on it.  The black edge was liquid shoe polish spomged on, then when that was dry I sponged on some pale green watercolour.  The ferns, or leaves, were just done with markers, but I am still thinking over the next step.

This page, as you can see, is the one facing the leaf page.  Since I had my pastels out (which doesn't happen very often these days), I thought I would have a play.  soft pastels are very concentrated pigment.  what I did here was scrape them so that the powder was sitting on the page.  Then I sprayed the page with water and stood the book up to let it drip.  This reminds me of a wisteria arbour  and i might actually turn it into one, but it needs thinking.

This was an experiment with waxed paper.  I scrunched up a large piece of waxed paper, then opened it out and ironed it onto the paper.  Then I put some dilute watercolour over the page and you can see the pattern it made, sort of a parchment type look or a leather look.  (The splotches were on the page before I started).

These two are parts from a page that I used under my work on this and other occasions.  Usually, I dampen the page before I start, so that and drips will spread on it.

A very papery day today, with not much stitch in it.

In the toy box and watercolour

another simple fabric card

As you can see, my tranfer went much better this time.  toy theme fabric, vintage boat embroidery/applique, transparency transfer.  Buttons.
Aren't these the cutest little buttons?  A friend gave them to me and I just had to use them they were so cute!

I have been doing a bit of playing with paint, mostly for use in my artbooks and in fabric books.
With this paper, I wet my paper first  (too wet as we shall see) then dropped watercolour randomly all over it and let it move.  Then I applied different things to them as they dried.

Here they are with their additions, drying.

This part of the paper had bubble wrap added whilst drying

This sectioon had salt crystals added

This section had scrunched gladwrap (saran in us)

This section had nothing added.
As you can see from the dried pieces, the colour faded a lot.  Water colour does become less bright as it dries, but my mistake here was to over wet the paper so it took a very long time to dry and as a result, the colours spread too far and became washed out.
Although I did not get quite what I was after, the pastel washed out paper, will come in useful for backgrounds.

Of course mishaps like this always lead to more 'what if...'s'  than I have time to complete.  what do you think about living to 150?  Do you think I'll get bored by then?

Let's play and go shopping

Today's ATC is a mixed media one

On  an ATC mattboard, scribbled markers (textas), black shoe polish, glitter. enamel square, spiral paper clips, cardboard letters (and tacky glue of course).
and all I've got to blog about is a bit of shopping!
I am the dollar store queen, when it come to supplies.

some pealy brads.  I love brads.

some light wooden circles, which might make a good stamp and embellishment.

some stick on gems, which I of course wanted yesterday for my ATC, so had to do something different

Some great foam stamps, I love butterflies, don't we all?

Some felt sheets, for 69 cents!

leather scraps - a great find!

lots of great stickers with text, pictures, sayings etc.

some great papers.

Greaseproof paper, which is just like craft tissue and which I use in fabric papers and tissue collage. And contact film, clear book covering, which is great for tape transfers and means you are not limited to the width of tape.

some pebbles, which I have been wanting for a while

And last of all, some cheap kid's paint brushes, which you can refill with whatever you want, then squeeze to paint, useful for painting big areas, and for coating pages with PVA.

So, although I haven't got any work to show today, I have done a bit of preparation and since it is my birthday tomorrow, I don't feel too guilty, lol

Don't forget to spoil yourself!

Paper making and painting

After watching a video from Linda Kemshall about paper making on design matters recently ,
I ripped up some paper scraps, got out my mold and deckle

and old vitamiser/Blender

and made a bit of handmade paper.

I made about 2 dozen sheets.  Here is a good tutorial for making paper and the tools you need
This paper has not been pressed much, so it soaks up paint really well.  More about that later.

Also on the paper theme, I had been wanting to try some painted paper hand towels for a while as they have such great texture.

 These two are just drops of watered down watercolour paints (purple, blue, green and yellow) on dry paper towels.  After painting, I scrunched the towels up to mix all the colours together

This is the same as the first two, however I dripped the paint on a damp paper towel

This one is a paper napkin - just one  ply/layer not the whole thing and it was just too fragile when wet.  It fell apart.

This is the same napkin, but instead of dripping paint onto it, I pressed it into my freezer paper (that I used underneath to protect the table) and it picked up all the little bits that were still there

Here is a napkin, done by pressing onto the freezer paper after I dripped paint on the freezer paper.

Finally, I tried out some of the handmade paper.  On the left, I dripped the paint on, and it tore when I picked it up.  On the right, I pressed it onto the freezer paper after adding paint to the freezer paper.  This gave some lovely ink blot type marks.

I think this technique will be something I do whenever I have some paint left over from something as the textures are very nice.

Painted papers

At present, I am posting a lot of mixed media, however I do have a number of textile pieces in process. 
I will be posting these as they are finished in the next few weeks
Deadlines are looming, and of course, that is when the work gets done, lol.
Today I am posting about some painting on paper I did recently.  The papers will be used in collage and mixed media work.

As you can see from the overviews above, I did quite a few samples as well as trying out a couple of techniques at the same time.
The first thing I wanted to play with was paste paper.  I had recently read about this at a gorgeous bookbinding blog here.  If you are not at all interested in paper, you will be after looking at her galleries.

Paste paper is like what we called fingerpainting at Kindergarten, just a bit more of a grown-upversion. Whilst not really paste papers, the two above were printed with paste paint, using a lace doily (a mass produced machine one) The first is the positive and the second is the negative.  I loved this effect.

These second two are using paste paint on newspaper.  In the first one, I used a barbecue rubber brush to create a pattern, in the second, my fingers, but you can see that even with dark paint the coverage is really not good enough for newspaper.

This sample used green paste paint with glitter on brown paper.  The swirls were created with the rubber brush.

This paste sample was swished with the brush.  This was on a coated paper and you can see in the top right that the coating decided to come off.  not a good paper to use.

This one is the same, using a brush to create texture, but on a more interesting paper which knows how to behave.  This was on an opened out white paper bag, (with a shiny side, like you buy lollies/candy in at the shop)  The result was almost translucent when dry and I really liked it.

The same white paper and paste, using the rubber brush to make this lovely texture.  My favourite.

This time more colours, some metallic and a small brush to make swirls.  This one is great, too.

This one is what is called a pulled paper - You know when you used to make inkblots or butterflies by folding the paper paint side in then opening it again.  The texture is really interesting and I will be doing maore of this type.

The other things I wanted to play with were newspaper and adding stuff to painted papers.

Here are three painted newspapers.  The two things I learned were that the paint needs to be dark and thick and more than one layer works best.  I don't want to obscure all the print, but I want it to be difficult to read.
I also decided that it would be worht trying a light coat of gesso before painting to wash out the text a bit, then I could have more muted colours.

These three were all paint on paper, but with different additions sprinkled on.  The one on the left was baking soda - in the middle rock salt and right was sugar.  They all create a different texture. ( I do not think the baking soda changed the colour, but being a biochemist I am aware this is possible, so as i can't remember if the paint was the same in all three, I will just have to do it again)

The final two samples are just using different papers.

This one is on white butcher's paper, the type they wrap your meat in.  I used the shiny side and found it took prints really well.

This last sample was an accident, but I was interested in what happened.  I used freezer paper under my papers to protect the work surface and this is a piece which inadvertently got painted.  I thought the paint would come off, but it doesn't, so it's worth keeping my protecting sheets for another project.

All in all, this was a very productive day, and I got a lot  sheets of lovely paper to use in my books and mixed media out of it.  The sample tags I have shown here are just little bits cut off the edges of thode sheets, and would you believe it?  I have also used the scraps from cutting out the tags on some collaged book covers!

We don't waste much around here!