Drawing and Collage in Lockdown

Seeing as we are still in lockdown, I treated myself to an on-line purchase, some Tim Holtz fabrics.

I have decided to work a bit more on collage as I love the layered look that you get with paint but it is harder to achieve with fabric. So, I thought I would make myself another sketchbook and do some more on paper first. I find the sketchbooks that you buy with the spiral binding annoying when trying to draw, if you are using both sides of the paper.

I used some large watercolour paper folded in half and made a cover with some really heavy interfacing. I went looking for some fabric to fuse onto the cover and decided to use some of my new Tim Holtz fabric.

Usually, people hand sew the pages into the book, but I did it with a large stitch on the sewing machine. I've done it that way before and had no trouble.

So, now I have a lovely new sketchbook to use.

I have also been doing some mono-printing with some eucalyptus leaves, I think they were too big and I don't know if I'll ever use them. In fact, I am much happier with my sun-printing results.

I might see what one or two look like with some stitching on them.

I have also been trying to draw everyday, just a little pen drawing in the concertina sketchbook I made.

That is a benefit of staying at home all the time, you get to play around with this and that.

I've also been quilting my latest improv quilt that I finally finished piecing together.

I have been busy and luckily we are locked down because I haven't done my art quilters homework. That's on my to-do list along with lots of other stuff.

Bye for now,

Linda

Masterclass with Claire Benn

The UK Festival of Quilts was on over the weekend, but it was a virtual quilt show this year. They also had classes over the internet for the first time. I signed up for a Mark Making class with Claire Benn, I have always admired Claire's work and want to try and do more mark making and screen printing kind of work.

The class was for one hour and was on at 8pm on Friday night for my time zone. Here is my Ipad set up waiting for the class to start via Zoom.

I had my work space and tools all set up, waiting to go, it was exciting.

Claire Benn recommended that we only use white fabric and black paint to keep things simple. I used black screen printing ink.

Our first instruction was to put masking tape on our fabric to act as a resist.

Then we followed along with Claire starting with a gelli plate and foam brush.

I didn't take any progress photos after that because I was busy keeping up with everything.

Here is what it looked like finished.

I really enjoyed the class. I left it to dry overnight and I went and cleaned the paint off all my brushes and tools.

The next morning, I took off the tape.

I love it. Claire said that the idea was to try lots of things and eventually you will get to know the marks that you enjoy making and continue on with those that suit your own work.

Of course, this is just a practice piece and not a completed work, but I definitely think I could do more of this kind of thing. I have to start and try it soon though. I have learnt from the past that I can do a workshop and then go home, pack things away and get on with my life and lose the momentum and excitement of the class.

The zoom class worked so well and it was amazing that people from all over the world were doing it at the same time. Claire is a very experienced teacher.

I can imagine doing this sort of class again, so much cheaper than an airfare to the UK and hotel fees etc. That is one of the only benefits of this horrible Corona virus.

Speaking of which, my state, Victoria has now gone into Stage 4 lockdown. All retail and business closed except for supermarkets, banks, petrol stations, doctors and a few more things.

We have a curfew and are not allowed out from 8pm until 5am unless we are coming home from work.

Only one person may leave the house for shopping and it must be within a 5k radius and for one hour only. We are allowed to walk or run for an hour a day with only one other person from the family. We must always wear a mask when outside of our house. There are huge fines for disobeying these rules.

The virus had got out of control and we are having between 400 and 700 new cases daily and 10-13 deaths daily. Too many for the size of our population.

This will go on for 6 weeks. It will be spring before we are allowed out again. I hope this works!

Luckily, I have plenty of sewing to do and we can see friends and family over the internet.

Bye for now,

Linda

Circle Series 6

I've continued to work in a series with my circles theme, although I must admit my interest is waning. I don't think they will translate to some larger work, but you never know I suppose.

I've actually gone back to my number 4 in the series, I was never happy with the result.

Circle series 4

I decided that the reason was that the background triangle shapes were too large and so there was no difference in scale between the background and the circles.

I made another with a background of smaller shapes. It took a lot longer to put together.

No 6 background

 I used the blue colours because I was sick of the pink and green.

Circle series no. 6

It's ok, but I don't love it. Maybe the stripes just set off the circles so much better than triangles.

Here is a photo of all six in the series. How funny - I'm starting to like the first one again!

Circle Series

I also made another little paper collage out of my gelli printed papers.

Paper Collage

 The little collage is small, only 7" wide and 4" high but they take a surprising amount of time to make. I wish I could say that I whipped it up in 10 minutes because that what it looks like, but in reality, it was more like a couple of hours!

The bad news here in Melbourne is that we are experiencing a second wave of the virus and last week we went into 6 weeks of lockdown again.
This time I want to get more sewing done and not so much of the playing around and experimenting.

Bye for now,
Linda

Flour paste resist

I have been trying lots of surface design ideas while we've been in lock down. I don't know why, I suppose it's a distraction from everything that is going on.

I followed the instructions in a book called Art Cloth by Jane Dunnewold.

I mixed up a paste of equal parts of plain flour and cold water, 3/4 cup of each.

It was the first time I had ever done it, so I got out a piece of hand dyed fabric, some gelli printed fabric and some commercial fabric as well.

You put the cold water into a bowl and gradually add the flour, mixing it up until it resembles a pancake mixture in consistency, not too thick, not too thin. I used equal quantities of flour and water and used it that way.

I pinned down the fabric to hold it in place. I have a homemade printing board that is slightly padded and I also used a painting canvas that still has its plastic cover on it.

I spread over the flour paste, I didn't know if it was too thin or not but in the end it seemed to work.

Pretty scary looking isn't it?

I left it to dry for 24 hours. It's winter here in Australia so it definitely needed 24 hours to dry.

As it dries it shrinks, shrivels up and becomes very stiff. Luckily, I pinned it or it might have turned into a ball of fabric.

When it is completely dry you bunch up the fabric, creating cracks in the flour paste. In the book there was a warning not to overdo the cracking and in the small pieces I did overdo it, probably because a 6" piece of fabric was easy to scrunch.

After you scrunch it and form the cracks, you paint over it. Many people use dye in this step and then you need to use soda ash to fix it and then when it's dry you have to do all that rinsing to remove the excess dye. I didn't want to do that.

I used Sun Dye paint which is an Australian runny acrylic paint, sort of like Dye na Flow paint. It's heat set so you don't need to rinse it out.

I painted with black mostly and some magenta on a couple of fabrics.

The Sun Dye paint likes the sun especially and we only have a really weak sun at the moment so I left it to dry for 24 hours.

The next day I put the fabrics in a bucket of cold water and rubbed the fabrics together to loosen the flour. That bucket of water ends up very gunky. Apparently, you do not want to pour the gunky fabric down the sink, so I poured it onto the garden.

Then I put the fabrics in another bucket of clean, cold water and they rinsed out very quickly.

To completely clean them, I washed them in the washing machine. You always use cold water with this technique so you don't end up with glue!

I was happy with my results. I think I cracked too much though because when I see what the professionals do, their cracks are very fine and spindlier. The magenta ones were a fail, I must have cracked the flour paste too much because they came out solid magenta, as if the paint had run underneath the flour.

The top photo was only a 6" piece of fabric and I decided to see what happened if I added some green paint over the top.

That worked, so I was very happy with my experiment and think it is something I could use in the future, especially as flour is so safe and user friendly without having to use any chemicals.

Blogger has changed a bit and the settings are different to use, hopefully there won't be any issues.

Bye for now,

Linda

Palette Republic app

Oops, I made a mistake in my last post! I have corrected it now though. The app I have been using in my course to get the colours in the photo is called Palette Republic and is available on iPhones and Android. I had called it Moment by mistake. The Moment app has easily adjusted setting for poor light etc. and is for taking photos

I can't believe that I made such a huge mistake. When I look back at my photos I realise that I had wrongly named them and so that is where the error stemmed from.

How did I discover my mistake?
My husband has installed a security camera at our front door and so he has been using my phone to work out how I can get movement alerts etc to the app on my phone. As he handed me back my phone this morning, he asked ' What is that Palette Republic app on your phone'.

As soon as he said it, I knew I had made a mistake and couldn't wait to get onto my blog and correct it.

Here are a couple more photos from the Palette Republic app.

Sorry for the confusion, I suppose it has also stemmed from me trying to fit too much into my days. Some of the online courses are finished now, so I can settle down and concentrate on getting some of my work done.

Here is a little collage I made with my gelli printed and painted papers. Our front yard was full of these little toadstools this year. I took a lot of photos.

This is the photo that used as a reference.

It is a very realistic version of the photo and I want to get away from doing such realism. I would rather try to be more abstract and arty. The more I study art, I think that creating realism is a learned skill but why create it when there is a perfectly good photo of the same thing already!

That's my plan, anyway.
Bye for now,
Linda

Inspired by Nature

One of the on-line courses I am doing is called Inspired by Nature. It is through Fibre Arts Australia and is run by Tara Axford. There are mostly Australians doing the course but there are also participants from other parts of the world.

This is an all-consuming course with notes and lots of videos and demonstrations for every step. We also have a private Facebook group where people post their photos and ask questions.
This course came at the perfect time for me, I was ready for something different to experiment with and focus on in these trying Covid 19 times.

I started the course a month ago when we were still having sunny days and beautiful autumn leaves. I go on a walk every morning and collect leaves, seed pods and anything that attracts me.

My walk collection

We photograph them and arrange in pleasing shapes and generally try to look at them.

We have to paint papers and gelli plate textures inspired by our finds and landscape.

I couldn't find my artist acrylic paints anywhere and thought that they must have dried out and I got rid of them. So, I went on-line and bought some Jo Sonja paints in landscape colours. I didn't want to spend big money on the more expensive paints in case I don't use them much. I am much more of a fabric than paper person. I also treated myself to some water-soluble crayons.

Jo Sonja paints

Of course, you can guess that I finally found my Golden acrylic paints when I was having a clean up in my specially organised drawers!!

I have taken so many inspirational photos of trees and plants in my area and have found a new love for them.

We have to print some out to make a mood board.

My Mood Board

I have since taken the photos off this board and pasted them into a book that I am making about this course.

I didn't take any photos of my gelli prints; I have done this sort of printing before but in other brighter colours. It was new and interesting to make landscape inspired prints. It seemed like I had more of a purpose than just randomly printing papers.

This led me to think about how I would use the gelli prints on landscape inspired fabrics.

So instead of just trying it out, I got out my only fabric paints, my Sun Dyes and decided to make samples of all the colours.

I painted each colour on its own and then I added a colour on top to see all the combinations I had. I enjoy doing these experiments. It must suit the organised type of person that I am.

Now I am thinking about landscapes, I decided I needed a few more browns etc, so went on line and ordered a few more. We are having some sunny weather this week so I'll make up some more paint samples with the new colours.

We have to make some little postcards inspired by our photos and here is the first one I made.

Gum-nut postcard

I used painted papers and gelli prints to make it. It's only 6" square.

I am still working through the course and we have a lifetime access to it, so I can do it again after I am finished. I might be better when everything is not so new to me.

We are doing some watercolour in the next section. I did find my old watercolour paints, thank goodness.

I don't know if anything will come of this course for my quilts. I am trying not to plan ahead, just do the course and go with the flow. I do feel very inspired by it though.

On a sadder note, three people that I know have passed away in the last month, two from cancer and one was an accident. Two were in their 60's and one in her early 70's, far too young.

One of the women was my very first patchwork teacher, Di Ford. I did a 10-week beginner class with Di in 1997. I was hooked from the beginning and was always impressed when she remembered my name in the years afterwards.

Here is a photo of a quarter of the first quilt that I made

My first Quilt.

Bye for now,
Linda

Fabric Paint for Mono Printing

In my last post I wrote about printing with a gelatin plate on paper. After a while I thought I would change to printing on fabric because it is fabric that I enjoy working with the most.

I got out all the fabric paints that I had on hand.

Fabric Paints

I had done a lot of prints on paper but I knew that it was more difficult on fabric. I also knew that paint sits on the top of fabric and can make the fabric stiff, something I didn't want especially when it comes to quilting.

I decided to do some testing and kept everything the same. The same white fabric and the same stencil shapes. I did a lot of printing that day. Here they are drying

I used the paints straight out of the bottle, some were a very thin consistency and so they might have performed better if they had been thickened. Those tests will have to wait for another day.

I was looking for paint that kept the fabric soft and printed clearly. Here's how they worked out it order.

1. Texcraft Dual Purpose

Texcraft Dual Purpose- soft hand and clear print

2. Setacolor Transparent

Pebeo Setacolor transparent- Soft hand and clear print

3. Sun Dyes

Sun Dyes- Very thin and runny but worked well with a soft hand and clear print

4. Gems

Texcraft Gems- medium hand a fuzzy print

5. Speedball

Speedball fabric paint- Fuzzy print and oil smell

6. Derivan Screen Ink

Derivan Screen Ink- Bubbly well rolling out and a lot of paint went through the fabric, fuzzy image

7.Tulip Fabric Paint

Tulip Fabric Paint, very runny, came through fabric, fuzzy print- rough feel

8. Derivan Fabric Paint

Derivan Fabric Paint- Came through the fabric, fuzzy image

9. Tsukineko Ink

Tsukineko Ink- very runny and thin, came through fabric

10. Setacolor Opaque

Setacolor opaque- Very pale print

To be fair some of these paints and inks were not meant for mono printing on a gelatin plate, but I wanted to find out what worked best for me so I didn't spend time or money in the future buying paints that didn't suit me.



When I found what I liked best I started to do some more prints, combining colours and using different stencils.

I still have a long way to go with this technique and not sure yet if it's something I will keep using. So time will tell. I really love making these prints though, it's very addictive.

Bye for now,
Linda