Playing in May

I haven't posted much lately but this doesn't mean I haven't been busy, both out there in the real world and in the quiet of my workroom.

First, remember the flowerpot? I haven't touched it since I last posted about it here, but I've added a little more paint and I think one more painting session will bring it up to the point of stitching. At last! Here's how it looks now: Mostly I added highlights, and it just needs some shadows on the white flowers and a little more paint on the edge of the step.

My friend Tricia was working on a piece at Fibrecircle this week and it really confirmed for me that this needs hand stitching, not machine. The Jan- Irvine-Nealie style of stitching isn't what I have in mind but rather using seed stitch so suggest the roughness of the brickwork behind the flowers. The hard machine line will be too strong. Stay tuned!

I've also been making quite a lot of monoprints on fabric. I have always been interested in monotyping and monoprinting but I recently bought a book called "Monotype: mediums and methods for painterly printmaking" by Julia Ayres, which has made me quite excited about the process again. I mostly make this kind of print with fabric paint left over from whatever project I've been painting on, but I think perhaps the monotype may just be the main activity for a while! Here's some things I've begun lately: A simple monoprint pulled from a glass plate and then over-painted.
This is a straight monotype (not altered from the original print) made as a coffee mug insert.And here it is in the mug:
This one was the ghost of the first print, over-painted. The designs need to be quite bright to be visible and exciting under the thick plastic outer layer. In this one the plate was repainted, with the original image as a guide. It was inverted before printing, and then over-painted once it was dry. They are all very different, aren't they? That's the fun part about making monotypes and monoprints!

I've also begun painting another of my "paint rags". It's an odd shape - 21 1/2in x 8 1/2in. Originally it looked like this:
It immediately said "boats on the shore" to me so it was set aside. I envisage the larger ship as a hulk, dragged up on the shore and left to fall apart, with the smaller boat pulled into its lee. I was trying to capture the rust and rough texture of the old boat, but I still have some way to go.

I've been trying to organise my paint rags a little lately. I haven't been marking them in any way and sometimes it's hard to remember what each one looked like before it was painted or printed again, to keep my records straight. So I am giving each one a number (I'm up to 60 already, so St Peter better not call me too soon!)and that should allow me to track each one as it gets painted or embellished, until it finally ends up in a work of art (or in the bin!). I know, you can take the librarian out of the library....

Oh, I forgot!

I also made some Artist's Trading Cards. I've been meaning to do some for ages and then a challenge from Helen at Fibrecircle got me going. We did a series of collaborative drawing exercises in March and Helen challenged us to use the drawings as the basis for ATCs. My drawing was supposedly imspired by Patrick Caulfield and, after it had gone round the table to everyone to add something, it looked like this: Not particularly like Caulfield's work, is it?

I decided to use the flower elements, so I drew them freehand with a black felt tip pen onto a piece of fabric I had coloured by monoprinting in an earlier Fibrecircle session. I monoprinted another fabric as the backing, and used Shapewell, a stiff woven interfacing, as the inner layer. I had originally planned to give the cards areas of flat acrylic, like Caulfield's work, but they seemed to need something more delicate. I added small areas of paint and stitched around them in black machine buttonhole stitch. They are much prettier than previous ATCs I've made.

Other things I've been working on

So much of what I've been doing lately can't be shown for a while yet, but I thought I'd put up these two things. The first is something I was working on throughout April, off and on. I wanted it to be a scene by moonlight. It started out with a monoprint, pulled off a glass plate: I really like monoprints, because they are so uncontrolled. They're a useful fabric to have around, because they look less obviously painted. I often use monoprinted fabrics as the basis for something else, but I also use them when I want a small amount of fabric of a specific colour, with some texture in it. So I often use up the leftover fabric paints from other projects by pulling a few monoprints off my glass cutting board, which is about A3 size, onto quilter's muslin. The fabrics go into my 'special fabrics' cupboard, along with all my samples and other play stuff.

I already had a rough idea of where I wanted to go, so this one didn't make it to the cupboard. With some painting it became this: A lot of the elements are roughed in here. It's very dark at this stage, because I hadn't added any light tones, except what was there as the pale blue background. After a couple more sessions of painting, it now looks like this: It was slow work because I was blending colours all the time on the leaves. It was a great exercise in tonal values. Often, the same paint reads dark in one place and light in another. It has a huge number of shades in it, because I was blending paints on the palette and often on the fabric as I went, to bring a shade up a little or darken it down. Heaps of fun! I think it's done now. The challenge for me with this piece was to make it look like a moonlit path, without making the garden look dark and scary and basically uninviting! I wanted it to look like a path you might actually go down, if you wanted a little adventure.

A second fun piece is this one: I was just playing around with paints, because I had them out anyway. I wanted to make a surreal landscape that didn't use traditional colours. I love the way it turned out. It's not anything earth-shattering, just a fun piece!

Collage

OK, time to unveil one of the things I've been working on. At Fibrecircle in March, Helen brought brown paper envelopes and challenged us to make a collage. The envelopes contained articles from Australian Geographic magazine. I didn't want to make a paper collage (been there, done that) so I chose to collage my photos onto fabric. I chose a painted fabric from my stash that looked like this: It was originally painted as one of two backgrounds for a book page swap in a now-defunct group called Art Divas. I collaged scraps of paper from the magazine photos, plus some from an accompanying map (I love maps!). It all looked a bit tacked together, and the blues were still very strong, so I added colour with fabric crayons and metallic pastels. I connected the roads on the maps with black marker pen lines, like a mud map. I like mud maps (the sort of map you draw in the dirt with a stick to show somewhere the way) and they've appeared in other pieces I've made. I added some images for planes from a single photo. I'd cut the maps with scissors, which was a mistake. I much prefer ragged edges.They still looked too blobby and not connected with the background. So I lifted them off and tore them apart and glued them back roughly in the same place. That looks much more interesting! I added in some strips of orange organza to provide some shadows.
I was starting to feel good about what was happening. But would I bother to finish it, when I have so many other things to think about right now? To make myself finish it, I challenged the other members of Like Minded Artist to join me in this exercise, choosing pages from their own glossy magazines and making a quick collage, due the end of March. Now I had a reason to finish mine!

I felt it was all look a bit much the same - not enough tonal contrast. So I splashed on some of my Setacolor paints:
Amazing how changing tone can change the mood! I also found an image that included a plane's shadow. I added it because I liked the ambiguity. It doesn't look like the shadow of one of the planes in the collage. Is it another plane? Is there another plane somewhere we can't see? The other planes are so bright that the dark tone makes it more ominous, suggesting it may be an enemy.
All along, I'd planned to overlay the collage with organza, which I'd then strip back in some places. This was partly for practical reasons. I had attached the paper elements with a simple glue, because I knew I wanted to stitch through it and I didn't want anything that would clog the needle. But that glue is not known for its permanence, even on paper. An overlay would help to hold everything in place, even if it wasn't actually stitched down. I had some organza I'd painted a while back, just to see how organza took Setacolor paint. It gave the surface a very muted pattern, like a moire. I traced the mud map and map roads onto the organza, overlaid it and stitched it down with a meandering pattern.
Oh wow, shiny! I'd forgotten that organza really hogs the limelight! I started snipping the layers back, sometime adding a few of the snippets underneath areas I didn't cut back. It looked better but still distractingly shiny. I thought about melting the organza but I'd have to work very carefully, so I didn't char the surface underneath, so I rejected that option. Finally, I decided to try a layer of light matte gel medium. I figures this would tend to make the organza opaque, and glue everything down. Here's how it looks now: It's still a bit shiny, where the organza didn't lie down flat, but it's interesting rather than distracting. The gel medium made the marker pen run in a few places, something that actually adds something here but is good to know about for the future! And yes, I do think it's done now.

Just a little teaser

I've been busy lately but sadly, most of what I've done is Sekrit Stuff, so I can't put any of it up here. But I thought I'd give you a teaser, so you can see I have been busy and not swanning around the Caribbean on a cruise ship or lying on a beach in Bali, like some lucky friends of mine.

So what are you looking at? OK, one of these 2in virtual strips represents my Kambra Challenge 2009. Remember, I belong to a group that has been meeting for an annual challenge for, can it be a more than a decade? You can see some of our previous challenges here (and yes, most of my unfinished ones are still unfinished). This year, our challenge was to use a pack of 40, 7in 1895 Bali Watercolors in delicious blues and greys and browns and the unveiling date is fast falling upon us. I don't want another unfinished quilt so I have a cunning plan... Another of these shows my piece for a Like Minded Artist challenge that came originally from a Fibrecircle activity. It's coming along nicely and may even make the Mar 30 deadline, after which time you can see it in all its glory. And another image shows a slice of another Fibrecircle activity, which we were challenged to use to make into ATCs. These are due on Apr 8 and then I'll show them, either here or on the Fibrecircle blog. And not only will Fibrecircle members get an ATC, but a couple of people who have set me ATCs might actually get one back. Progress! Of course, along the way I've painted a whole lot more fabric pieces, which at this stage look remarkably like painted fabric so I won't bother to put them here.

Meanwhile I'm also thinking about my Voyages and Passages piece for ATASDA's Palm House exhibition in 2010. So many possibilities!

I haven't been entirely locked in my workroom. Yesterday, I went on an expedition with my friend Carol, to Petlins for some essential weaving supplies, and via an Aladdin's cave of a fabric shop to NSWeave aka NSW Spinners and Weavers Guild. I managed to find some delicious organza and some acrylic felt (everything I have here now is wool felt that doesn't melt, darnit!), some silk tops and yarn for later dyeing with Fibrecircle, a weaving book I couldn't live without and these cute little stamps.

Aren't they fun? Just called out to me to take them home. A most satisfactory excursion.

Inspiration

And while we're talking about exciting stuff, I was so excited by the work of Carolyn Cabena, the speaker at the ATASDA NSW Branch meeting yesterday. Carolyn is a life member of ATASDA, having joined way back when it was the Batik Association, and it was fascinating to see slides of her work over many years. She's worked with batik (of course), screen printing, shibori dyeing and resist discharges, devore, pleating - and her work is just fabulous! You can read about her here (she's also involved in Craft Australia) and see a tiny example of her work here . Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have a web page or gallery, apart from what is on display through Craft Australia, so you might need to go to the Gallery, 104 George Street
The Rocks Sydney 2000 to see her work in person. It's really inspired me, although I paint fabric rather than dyeing it, to return to my screen printing beginnings.

Sun printing

Darn, I forgot to mention that the Fibrecircle group finally found some sun for sun printing, fortnight ago. Check out my sun prints here plus the others' immediately afterwards.

I have decided I love sun printing! It has so many possibilities for adding texture and laying. Make sure you look at Prue's pieces, which were done partly under glass, which gives a very interesting effect. And Carol's very tidy samples of different approaches (my samples are never that organised!) give a great idea of what you can achieve right from the start.