Jelly love

This is day 21 of 

I have recently become an addict.  Of Gelatin Printing, that is.
I can't seem to stop. The colours you get are wonderful and it is all so satisfying.  Just a few hours and you end up with so many prints you run out of space to store them, lol.
Today, I spent about an hour printing and I would probably bore you if I showed all my prints.

This is my gelatin plate.  It is about 11x11 inches.

I like to use gelatin, especially now as the weather is getting warmer, as the paint does not dry so quickly.  I do sometimes use an acetate sheet or a perspex sheet, and I do have a silicone plate, but I only use these for certain things, such as  printing plants and grasses, which are hard and do cut into the gelatin plate, because these plates need me to add a retarder to my paint in order to slow the dying time.  I find the cool surface of real gelatin keeps the paint wet longer.

Here are some prints drying,  For me, the process is limited by how much space I have for the prints to dry.
And here are a couple of my favourite prints from today.

Sorry about the blurriness of this one.  It was one of my favourites. The background was a piece of paper I had rolled excess paint from my brayer on (I don't throw much out, lol)

This one, which is the reverse of the one above, printed from the paint left after I had taken the stencil off.  The background is tissue paper (kitchen paper) that had been covered in inks.

This one was also printed on a previous print.  and was also printed after removing the stencil (which was just the card left when I took the shapes out of a silhouette cut).  You can see I often re-use my less than perfect prints as a background.
This is just a few of the prints, I printed about 25, so it was a short, productive session.  Mostly, I print on kitchen paper, which is a bit like deli paper.  We call it Greaseproof paper in Australia.  The reason I do this is that mostly I use these papers for collage and they layer well, being so thin.
Anyhow, enough talking.
Happy Creating

A few stencils, and voila!

Here is my piece for Art Every Day Month, Day 20!

It is a 9 inch canvas.  I put down some acrylic colours, using a scraper to get streaks of colour, then when it was dry, I added some feathers in molding paste through a stencil.  When they were dry, I added the blue ink spray through a stencil, then after that was dry, I paintedthe feathers with some different lumiere paint. After that was dry (again) I added some black around the edges of the feathers with a black ink marker.  Since the ink was watersoluble, I went back with a damp brush and feathered the black out to create shadows.
It depends on the angle you look at it as to whether you see the sheen of the metallic paints.
I was pretty pleased with it.  Hope you like it.

Happy creating

Butterfly magic

A few weeks ago  I made a tiny little doily, by using free machine embroidery on water soluble stabiliser, here.
This week I have been working on a larger piece that is a butterfly and I have finally finished it.

This is it in the hoop, before I dissolved the solvy. You can see I just outlined the wings and didn't add any details with marker before I stitched it - you can also see that I changed my mind about the lines as I went along as well (The lilac is my stitching, the brown are my guide lines)

Here it is after I had rinsed away the plastic stabiliser and dried it.  i put my hand in to show how lacy it is and how big it is.

and here's a close up to show the wings more clearly.  You can see my stitching isn't perfect, but if you know me, you know that is not an issue.  I like my work to look hand made.

i am looking forward to putting this on my crazy quilt in the new year!  I may dye it or paint it, depending on where it goes.

Happy creating

rotating

After my day from hell yesterday, today was much better.
I copied yesterday's journal page and added it to a book about pots and teapots

This book is 11x11 in and my copy was 11x8.5, so I needed to finish the page and started adding tapes.  I was having fun with that and continued right across the page.
I make my own tapes with double sided tape and the tape layer might be anything, on this spread, there is fabric, paper, plastic, lace, felt, foil and so adding anything to the page was problematic
So - I didn't glue anything down.
The teapot is a gelatin print I made onto heavy paper a while ago and I just cut it out and added it to the page with a brad and voila'

The teapot rotates and pours the tea!
Silly me.
Happy creating!

One of those days

After such a busy day away from home yesterday, Today I felt a little washed out.  I have actually got a few things done, but it was a struggle.
I did a page of my Pam carriker journal - from her latest book - CREATING at the speed of life, which is a great book for working on art elements.  My students would say 'why do I need to work on these things if I already know them?', but you can always learn something more, and more importantly, once you  have learned something you need to do it often for it to stay in your repertoire.
The other thing I did was to work on a larger piece of water soluble lace, this one is about six inches so involves a lot of stitching and I will probably finish it this week.
I also did my daily page in my journal. Being in a bad mood, I could not think of what to do, so I got a water soluble pencil and scribbled loosely without looking.  Then I looked at my lines and I saw a jug.

So I added some more and defined the jug and activated the pencils with a water brush filled with diluted matte medium (this makes the watercolour permanent when dry, but it is also thicker than water and I find it works better with watersoluble media)
I filled in the background with some watercolour that was left on my palette from a few days ago.
I wondered what to write and the sentence just occurred to me.  Then I did my messy journalling at the bottom.
So that's what I got up to for Day 17 of AEDM.
Happy creating

At the workshop

Today I went to a soft Pastel workshop given by Max Wilks run by a nearby Art Group some of my friends go to.  We were at a gorgeous old homestead in a national park with gardens tended by the local  garden club.

Here are some of the gardens. there was also lots of lawns, a lake and an orchard.

I took a lot of pictures, which I won't post all today.

This was the picture I settled on for my painting.

And this is where I got to with my painting.  I still have a way to go, but I decided to wait until I have blown up the photo to do the details, since my camera screen is only the size of a business card and I was getting quite tired.
But I'm sure I have done my AEDM challenge for today, particularly as I hadn't touched my pastels in several years!
Happy Creating!

Is it a mosquito, or a dragonfly?

No idea, but it's what happened on the page.
I had been watching a video on using glazes and decided to have a try with one of the pages in my journal where I had just slapped all the leftover paint.

This was the page I chose.  As you can see, a big mess, but I thought I saw something flying on the left hand side.

I outlined the shape I could see and put a yellow glaze over everything else to unify the background.  It worked well.  The texture is still visible underneath, but the shape is much more prominent.

Here I blocked in the shape I saw and turned a circle that was under all the paint but showing through into a sun. I still wasn't happy with my shape and spent a long time thinking....

And this is what I ended up with.  I got so engrossed that I forgot to take pictures in between.
I lightened the body and three of the wings with an iridescent violet then added highlights with a lilac paint pen, then I went back in with a silver and a red gel pen and added more, smudging as I went.  finally, I went over the veins and dark shadows with a black glaze pen.
Here are a couple of close ups.

So, it's amazing what can come out of a messy page!  I do like finding things in my backgrounds and this one, although he is not sure whether he is a mosquito or a dragonfly - turned out well.

Today is Day 15

Happy creating