Mandala Medley

 I’m continuing my paint pouring experimentation in the studio and spent this last week trying out some different stencils of various mandala style art.  I actually like all 3 pieces which tells me I’m starting to understand what’s going on and how to work with the materials.

First up is the moody green piece that got some very favorable comments when I posted the background.  I found just the right swirling leafy stencil and I really like how it came out.  I’ll be doing more with this image and trying different backgrounds as I try out different ways to manipulate the paint.

Second in my opinion is this mandala which I have used before.  I like how the green of the mandala brings out the colors along the edge of the peach and blue.  I think a dark blue might also have worked well as a mandala color and I like the color palette in the background so I will likely be doing something similar in the future.  The blue ring is a bit more dominant than I would like so I will be changing that.

And last is a more subtle color combination with little tiny hearts.  I’ll be changing the hearts to just the v at the point so it’s more abstract.  Overall, they all came out okay and have given me lots of paths to take in future playing around.

Playing with Pouring

 My experiments continue with paint pouring and different techniques for manipulating the paint and then adding to it with silkscreens or stencils.  Big thanks to Olga Soby for her wonderful videos that have been a major inspiration.

First up are some pours I did with warm colors and then did stencils on top.  Here’s the one I’m mentally calling Rocket Mandala but that’s my wierd sense of humor.  It’s just a sample piece so I don’t actually have to come up with a real title.

Since I’m planning on doing birds or dancers, next I did an owl on a stump.  I think he really needs a moon in the upper right corner but I’m not sure yet.  That should be decided and done this next week.

These were both done with the ring pour technique for the backgrounds.  While I like the layering of the colors, I don’t think the technique is quite what I want so I started experimenting with blowing the paint around after pouring it.  I have multiple ways to do this and started with a blowdryer and the squeeze bulb I use with alcohol ink.  

This first one was supposed to be a mostly green backgroound with a lighter yellow spot in the middle for a hummingbird stencil.  Unfortunately, the blowdryer I used had a really wide nozzle attachment and blew paint everywhere.  I like the misty layering of the green but want more control.

So next I used the blowdryer on low.  This meant I had to practically touch the surface to get any paint movement so that’s not going to work either.   I tried blowing the paint in a swirl around the center color and that had some interesting effects that I think would look good with dancers.  In Space.

And last I used  my squeeze bulb.  This worked well and gave me good control but made my hand ache afterwards.  Since this was only an 8x8 piece, I need a different thing for larger pieces.

So I am now assembling things to try this week.  Another blow dryer and metal straws for blowing directly on the paint myself.  Here’s hoping I get something that works well.

Using Rapid Resizer to experiment in the studio

 My alcohol ink experimentation continues.  This last week, I tried using a stencil to paint over an alcohol ink background.  This was not as successful as I'd hoped (see below)  and I decided to try just the rose from the center of the stencil after blowing it up in size.  

I could do a black and white version of the rose and then pop into my photo software and scale it that way but I decided to give Rapid resizer a try.  The stencil rose is on the small sheet and the 2 different sizes from RR are to each side.  This turned out to have a couple of advantages over using gimp:  one, I don't have to organize the images on my computer, RR keeps the designs for me and 2) if I want to scale up a design for a larger piece, I don't have to do the dividing it into pages for multipage printing.  

Next step is making the 2 stencils with the scanNCut machine and then I'll play with what color to use for the rose.  I have a fun week planned.  Hope you do too.

Alcohol Ink monoprint on fabric

 I'm experimenting with alcohol ink because it's a really quick drying fluid way to create color and it works on both paper & fabric.  Today's experiment was to see if an alcohol ink bird done on glass could be successfully printed on fabric.  Here is the starting bird shape.

This was done using a nasal syringe to blow the ink around and see if I had enough control to create shapes.  If I were finishing this as a bird piece of art, I would add details and more with ink pens along with a background.  But first, I wanted to see if my ideas about how to transfer from the glass to fabric would work.  

I stabilized a piece of white cotton by ironing it to a scrap piece of freezer paper.  I let that sit overnight, and today I sprayed the fabric with 90% isopropyl alcohol to reactivate the alcohol ink that is on the glass.  Then I used my favorite brayer to rub to make sure the ink transferred.  There was some ink left on the glass but what did transfer did not seriously run or bleed so I'm fairly happy with this outcome.

There is some blurring of the edges so I would definitely want to sharpen the details with the ink pens if I was using this technique for the foreground of a piece.  This will however be an excellent way to create moody backgrounds and I'm looking forward to more experimentation.

Studio Sabbatical or reading instead of doing

 Thanks to my back having it's every 13 year super spasm, I am not doing much in the studio.  For the last 2 months.  *sigh*  Once I got over the worst of the pain, however, I was thankful the library sent me a book on alcohol inks.  It's a fairly popular book so I had a several month wait for it and had forgotten about it.  Having it pop to the top of my hold list gave me a lovely distraction.

Pigments of the Imagination is a guide to learning the medium with a series of explorations.  I sometimes think of this type of book as an art cookbook as I'm one of those people who actually reads cookbooks all the way through to find ideas & recipes.  I bought an inexpensive set of inks to try it out and will get the more expensive brand name inks if I decide to pursue it.

One of the things I do when browsing books like this is write the things I particularly want to try on a post it that goes on the inside cover.  (My cookbooks have the recipes & page number written on the book pages rather than a post it because I like annotating them.)

I filled 2 post its before deciding I should try things out first.

Part of the appeal here is that the inks are very concentrated, like the Derwent Inktense pencils/bars, and work on both paper and fabric.  So the experimenting will begin soon, once I'm over the flu/sinus infection that is adding to my wonderful medical life right now.  Hoping you are in much better health & also enjoying making art.

Murphy's Law in the Marbling studio

 Last week, I attempted to do a whole lot of marbling.  I did actually do a bunch but everything that could go wrong, did.  Hence Murphy's Law.

I was using the palette from a NASA photo of the earth from space: blues, white for clouds, green for continents with a dash of orange for not green land.  And these colors worked well together but the first thing that went wrong was I tried using a white paint that I've never used before without testing it for spreading on the thickened water.  Lots of it fell to the bottom so the first thing on my list of things to fix is to check all the paints I'm planning on using for proper spreading on the medium.  The blues were mostly okay but the greens and the whites, not so much.

  Then the medium was a bit thick. I hadn't checked that either, using my tried and true formula for mixing it but apparently age of the powder and humidity do indeed affect the consistency.  This is not a fatal error since all it means is I have to rinse the fabric more thoroughly after marbling to get all the goo off, but again, something to fix.

I couldn't find my marbling notebook with all my notes of things I learned from experience so I had to rediscover some things.  Like the first color put on the medium is not as noticeable in the overall design as the last color.  In this example, the orange was last following the green.  Way more of those colors than I wanted altho I think it's still pretty fabric.

After that day of surprises, I switched to the shaving foam to try out some blue and white ideas.  I got the white swirls I was looking for but also learned I can't do a thinner layer of foam just because I'm running out.  It just won't allow the manipulations I want to do.

I like the bottom one better as it has more of the swirling look I was after.  The top one suffered from my not remembering the correct patting technique for making sure paint transfers completely.  

And to end off a frustrating week, I managed to mess up my back on Friday.  I spent the weekend resting, did lots of studio stuff on Monday but woke yesterday with yet more back pain.  So, it will be next week before I get back in the marbling studio.  I can only be thankful I have a massage appointment in a couple of days.  

My favorite Marbling tools

This last week was supposed to have me back in the studio doing some marbling inspired by one of the earth from space photos from NASA.  Alas, I was unable to sleep through the night at all this week so I was only able to get some marbling prep done.  So, here's my current state:  marbling gel made, fabric treated, cut and pressed, ready to go, and colors selected.  I'm hoping some of you are looking at that picture and asking what's that thing? cuz that's what I'm going to talk about: my favorite marbling tools.

I learned to marble from books and an artist friend who took a weekend workshop.  I didn't have a ready source of tools and I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy it so I decided to diy most of the things I needed.  This meant re-purposing plastic pans and shoe boxes for marbling trays.  The rakes used to create tight patterns come in different sizes for different trays so I also needed to make my own of those.  In general, the only thing here that's recognizable as a commercially available marbling tool is the pile of black whisks which my artist friend gave me.  Everything else was improv.

Going left to right, we start with a cardboard tube which I use to wrap the fabric around so I can unroll it on top of the marbling gel after I apply the paint with the whisks and manipulate it.  Using the tube as a roller makes fabric much easier to marble and allows me precise placement without much worry about errors at all.  To the right of the tube are all the paints I've selected for this palette.  I spent one summer trying out different paints I had and buying some samples of new ones for colors that my current paints didn't do well.  (Once applied to the marbling gel, the paints spreads quite a bit.  In particular, all the reds I had turned pink because the pigment was in too thin a layer.  One of many reasons why starting marbling is a steep learning curve.)  

Now we get to the real tools.  I made a few rakes/combs to fit the size of the trays I had available.  My first attempts used foamcore as the handle and various sizes of pins for the comb part.  Foamcore doesn't stand up well to wet so I used some trimmings from sheets of honeycomb plastic.  And I ended up using T-pins because they worked so well being inserted into the white plastic strip.  Waterproof, not going to shift around and easy to adjust the spacing if needed.  These turned out to be my second favorite tools. 

I've already mentioned the black whisks which are used to apply the paint to the gel surface.  I also use them to do the marbling strokes by flipping them over and using the solid end as a one pin comb.  This is easier than making really tiny rakes to use with small trays.  And my favorite tool is last.  The ceramic chopstick rests that I repurposed because the glossy glaze means the acrylic paint can be easily scraped off.  

So there we are.  I made 2 gallons of gel, have my 11x14 tray set up and all my paints and tools ready to go.  Monday I start throwing paint around.  

Dealing with epic resin failures

We're back from vacation and both Jeff & I are suffering some back issues brought on by the furniture in the condo we were at.  So my attempt to pour resin and do all the small pieces I had set up was pushing it a bit.  And my back got worse between the first pour and the second pour so I rushed the process to finish before I had to quit due to pain.  This was the first lesson of this epic failure in my resin adventures:  Don't work while in pain, especially if the work requires using the part of the body that's in pain.

Here's all but 2 of the pieces I made.  The other two got trashed because really they were total failures.  All of the above pieces have flaws and only two are fixable.  So this has turned out to be an epic learning experience.  What did I learn?

1) don't work while in pain.  see above.
2)  prewarm resin for both pours, not just the first. 3 pieces ended up with massive bubbles due to not prewarming the resin on the second pour. The leftmost piece above was perfect except for the tiny cluster of bubbles along one edge.  And check for bubbles every pour because they are fixable if caught soon enough.
3)  Do fewer pieces at one time.  One piece, the six pointed star, failed because the box that is supposed to keep the pieces from getting dust in the resin while curing got put directly on the edge of the piece rather than next to it which left some of the paper from the box on 2 of the points. Less crowding of the space by doing fewer pieces would have saved this one.
4)  No plopping the pictures down on the resin.  Lay them out from one edge toward the other so as not to trap air under them.  The large oval and the pink square both had this as the only flaw.  (I'm particularly unhappy about these failures as I already learned this lesson from marbling.  Bad Liz!  No keto cookies!)
5)  Elevate the items so I can better see the doming when I'm doing the second pour.  I overpoured several pieces, particularly the 2 I tossed.  While some of this can be trimmed and filed off, it's still something that's easier to prevent than to fix.
6) Keep the temp up in the correct zone for the entire curing time.  Two of the pieces have soft spots on the edges because of failure to cure correctly.  (This also occurs if  the resin mixing is not done properly but I don't believe that was the cause since both pieces were on the same side of the work table.  I have a small heater on order to fix this.)

What good things came out of this work?  I succeeded in using the 2 molds I made and they worked fine.  I mixed colors, tested an idea about marbling, and learned some things about using the mandala transparencies with colors behind them.  While I was incredibly frustrated right after unmolding things, I feel I learned a lot from the work.  And James Clear's email today reminded me of some important things to keep in mind.  His ideas today -

"If you haven’t started, then taking action is more important than finding a better strategy.

If you’re already taking action, then ensuring you’re working on the right thing is more important than working harder."

This is causing me to think about which part of the resin work is the right thing for me to be working on.  If only life's lessons weren't so rough sometimes. 

Testing new mandala stencils

This last week got thoroughly eaten by the garage sale which went fairly well, with a steady stream of customers, altho I wish more stuff had gone away.  *sigh*

So I'm taking it a little easy and spent time yesterday trying out some new mandala stencils.  I'm not happy with the motif in the upper left of this dancer piece and I'm searching for a replacement. To be honest, I'm not happy with several things, but the incoming energy ball is my starting point.

These mandalas came in a set of 35 stencils and are 5x5inches.  I do my tryouts in black ink on white paper so I can scan in the ones I like and do whatever sizes I need for the current work.

Since things look different once they're on paper, I did 5 of the ones I'm most likely to use.  If not for this project, for creating fabric I like for other projects.  Of these 5 possibilities, I like #11 the best.

I particularly like the broken line giving a circle in the middle of the spinning spiral.  There's lots of movement, but also the calm center.  I love the overall effect.  Next up, doing it in colors to see what happens to all that motion.

resin success and the adventure continues

Despite a bout of the flu this last week, I still got several hours of studio time in.  And I managed to get a bubble free resin layer on top of a print that went all the way to the edges.  Third try is the charm apparently.

Spiral Dance #1 on a 6x6 painted wooden panel looks pretty good with the resin topcoat.  It's hard to see the resin because it's so clear and shiny but that's what is causing the reflections on the surface.

What helped me get this lovely bubble free coating is my new LED headlamp with optional magnifying lenses.  The light is tightly focused in front as these are meant for close work and they perform beautifully. 

MagniPros

In addition to doing the print, I tried some experiments in using small mandalas on scrabble tiles and attempted a couple of five pointed stars.  The big red one is a 3d printed outline that my son printed for me and the little yellow muffin silicone was used for the smaller star.

The mandalas came out perfectly, nice and domed on top of the transparency.  But the 3d printed mold didn't work as the resin leaked all over and basically turned the whole thing into a winter holiday ornament.  Maybe I'll paint it gold...  The muffin mold worked, altho it needs a little trimming around the edges, but I don't really like the raised outline.  So, more work in my future getting the star pendant I want.

Still doing pretty well on trying things out with the resin and next up is making a silicone mold of a 3d printed five pointed star and marbling using the non-liquid coloring things I have.

resin experiment #2

Despite a horrible sinus/ear infection, I got some resin testing done this week.  I made up a board with different fabrics and used 3 different sprays I had on hand to see if any of them worked to block the darkening that happened with the first trial.  Here's the before fabric board.

I have a UV protective spray, a non VOC fixative (milk based), and fabric stiffening spray.  I left one column with no protection so I could see the difference.  I also glued the fabric down thoroughly using the purple Elmer's acid free glue sticks.    Then I used packing tape around the edges to stop the dripping that happened with the first board use.

Here's the results with some of the original fabric next to the board to show the darkening that happened.

The sprays don't seem to have made any difference but the darkening only happened with the darker fabrics.  I'm not sure what caused this completely different result altho I suspect just the glue itself helped lessen the darkening since I was very thorough about gluing the fabric down.  The lighter and medium fabrics didn't darken much if any so I'm going to work with a lighter palette for now and do some further experimentation.  

The bonus I got from this experiment is I discovered the fabric stiffening spray is reported as being very effective for use with the Scan N Cut.  I'll be testing that out myself later this week.  And I learned how to use my little torch to get rid of bubbles in the resin. Oh, and the packing tape was an epic fail.  It contained the dripping to one big spot but bulged out so it was still off the board.   All in all, a good bit of progress in understanding my new material.

Resin experiments begin

As I continue my studio experimentation, I turned to resin for sealing prints and as a possible top coat for fabric collage.  I also have seen some interesting marbling done with resin so that was also on my list.  So, I created 3 pieces to try out with a resin top:  a small dancer collage that I had in my to be finished up drawer, a piece with a photo of Audubon's Great Blue Heron with some various tested fabrics, and a board covered with gold ground that I would marble on.  Various searches on the internet told me that fabric may or may not darken when resin is poured on top and one way to test is to dip the fabric in water.  If it doesn't darken, the resin shouldn't darken it either.  So I tested a variety of green fabrics and put scraps of them on the piece with the photo.

The results were informative.  All of the fabric darkened.  I suspect this is because I prewash my fabrics so I removed the sizing that is on them when they are bought.  Clearly, first thing to test in the next batch of tests is whether a sealant on the fabric will keep them from darkening.  Here's the fabric collage piece, 6" square, and it's almost impossible to see the color of the L shaped cloud piece the dancer is on.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the entire piece before putting the resin on but I do have photos of the background fabric and the dancer element separately so you can see how much darkening has occurred.

As is obvious, the background fabric is seriously darker and greener which totally ruins the look of the piece.  And then there's the dancer element which loses all the subtle color variations.  Totally unhappy artist with this piece.

The heron photo with the green fabric scraps did somewhat better.  The photo and the marbled fabric along the bottom retained their colors and clarity.  So big win on using the resin for photos and a more work required result for the marbled fabric.  It's not obvious in the photo but the fabric scraps and the marbled fabric on this one floated up a bit in the resin and some stick out the top.  This can be dealt with by better glueing them down to begin with or by putting a second coat of resin on top.

        The green fabric scraps scattered around all passed the water test but darkened considerably so definitely a sealant test on fabric in my future.

And then the most successful of the 3 initial tests:  marbling on a board.  The colors worked well, the resin lost a tiny bit of marbling detail over time and except for the massive dripping off the bottom right corner, things were generally better than I expected.  I'll be doing much more of this type of thing in the future along with a couple of tests of taping the edges to stop the dripping off the sides.

I'm looking forward to working with the resin and I am absolutely happy with it as an alternative to acrylics for a topcoat on prints.  We'll see with the next round of experiments how many other places I can use it in my studio.

experimenting with digital ground and acrylic skins

In and around a disastrous attempt at a week away, I've been doing some experimentation with digital grounds (from Golden) which led to some trials of making acrylic skins.  I was feeling reluctant to blog about it all because I don't really have a finished piece to show off but then I realized there's real value in sharing the interim work.  That's where my learning happens, after all. 

The piece above, Grounded (fuchsia) is a purely digital piece.  I was taking photos of the purple background piece that exists in fabric and didn't have the light set up correctly.  One of the photos came out really pink rather than purple.  And I liked it.  So I fiddled with the colors in Photoshop for a bit and ended up with this piece.  This led to wanting to put it on one of the wooden panels I use for mounting/framing my work but the question was how?  And that led to the digital ground experiments.

First I tried the porous surface ground on various papers:  cardstock, tissue paper, and regular inkjet paper.  Why bother with the ground at all, you ask?  Well, the ground fixes the ink so it won't bleed, at least this particular ground so I don't have to use any extremely stinky fixative spray on it.  And since I was already having some serious allergy issues with chemicals this week, that seemed the way to go.  Of the 3 papers, the cardstock worked best.  Tissue paper had a tendency to crinkle up and distort and the cardstock curled less than the regular paper.  The cardstock is easy to adhere to the wood panel with a layer of gel medium and then fairly easy to trim to fit with an exacto knife or rotary cutter.  But there's that layer of paper in there and it forces me to use an image that goes all the way to the edges.  What would work as well but not have that layer of white paper?

Acrylic skins seemed an obvious answer.  I got introduced to them in my paint pouring class and Golden has a very nice video about using their digital grounds on varied media, including the skins.  They also have a nice video about making skins.  So I started trying this idea out.

First, I needed to make skins.  Maybe it's my quilter's background, but I immediately wanted to be sure what size of skin I was making.  That led to me creating a skin template on the maximum size paper for my wide bed printer.  (13" x 19" for the curious.)  Since acrylic skins are made on a non-stick surface which can be clear or mostly translucent, this will let me size them while making them.

So first I tried matte medium brushed on my 2 different Teflon pressing sheets.  They're what I use when fusing fabric and I have several extras as I used to have multiple surfaces covered with them.  I brushed the medium in one direction first, let it dry, then did the perpendicular direction.  Both of those were a good solid skin but a bit thin and I had problems getting the edge to start peeling up.  This is when I went to the Golden videos for info on making skins.

I switched to gloss medium since it dries clear and that is one of the things I was looking for.  And I poured a heavier amount of medium onto the Teflon sheets and spread it with a palette knife.  Unfortunately, the medium had a tendency to bead up and leave holes in the skin with the first layer.   So I made a mental note to try a gel medium next and moved on to trying a paint/gloss medium mixture on parchment paper.  This worked fairly well altho the resulting skin was streaky in the color because I didn't blend the paint into the medium before spreading it. 

And that's where I am now.  With some ideas of things to try and at least 2 workable approaches for what I want to do.  I have several more experiments on my list for February and I'll undoubtedly share them here.