More Mono-Printed Landscapes.

Here are some more mono-printed landscapes I made using the multiple layers technique. As well a paper I've used cotton fabric and even wadding as my base. I'll work into them with stitch later.

Bottles or Bowling Pins? - Felt Pictures.

I've finished two of my needle-felted pictures and mounted them onto canvases. They started off as bottles but have come out rather like bowling pins!

Adding White and Collage

This week on DMTV the lesson was on altering photographs with white paint and collage. Here are my pages in progress.

Experiments with Alcohol Inks

I've just bought some new alcohol inks to play with. These type of inks work well on non-porous surfaces such as metal and plastic. I've been trying them on all sorts of things starting with the recommenced Yupo paper above. They are much more shiny in real life.

Drawing over a previous acrylic pour.

Scrunched kitchen foil

Flat kitchen foil

Foils on Bondaweb

Thin copper

Melted and fused carrier bags

Cling wrap.

I'll sew into some of these pieces and collage them together.

Sketchbook Pages

I'm still working on the Creative Sketchbooks online course from DMTV. Here are some of my latest pages. This piece above makes use of some freezer paper stencils collaged with sponge prints and watercolours. 

This page combines a digitally altered photo with pen drawing, Gelli print and graphite.

These flowers are made with ink, dye and soluble graphite.

This page has a bleached ink drawing with digital photo, Gelli print, acrylics and paint pens.

Experiments With Nuno felt

This month at Contemporary Quilters we had a mini workshop from Martein van Zuilen. We had a go at making nuno felt which is made with wool fibres felted together with a sheer fabric, silk in this case. This piece has a black silk base with colourful wool fibres, red pre-felt squares and stripy silk fabric felted into it. I also stitched in some wool yarn part way through the process which has felted into the rest of the fabric.

This piece was made with wool fibres felted onto both sides of a piece of cotton cheesecloth.

First Attempts at Acrylic Pouring

I went to the university of YouTube to learn how to make acrylic pour paintings! You can find some excellent tutorials from Caren Goodrich.  If you prefer a website then Acrylic Pouring is a good one.

I used ordinary cheap acrylics from Spotlight mixed with Floetrol which is available at Bunnings DIY store. Mixing the paint with Floetrol makes it much more fluid without watering the colour down. I also used pure silicone lubricant (found in the personal section of the supermarket next to condoms!!) in each of my colours to help them rise and make beautiful cell patterns. The white paint was left without silicone so it would sink down whilst the colours rose through it. I used the dirty pour method on these paintings. When they were dry I added shine with a layer of pouring medium from the art store.

The kids had a go too!

By R

By L

Although these pictures look very nice there is no real skill in them, it's about 99% luck what you end up with. I wanted to take it further so I've been thinking about ways to combine the acrylic pours with other materials. First up I tried fusing some fabric to a canvas panel with a soldering iron. I then filled in the spaces between the shapes with a dirty pour applied with a syringe. I think I should have used more contrasting colours.

I have another experiment waiting for its layer of acrylic pour. Watch this space.

Pool Noodle Print Blocks

Just a very quick post today to show you what you can do with a pool noodle and a soldering iron. I've just made myself these new print blocks by melting holes and lines into some pool noodle slices.

Scrap Textile Abstract

Last month at Contemporary Quilters our challenge was to turn some scraps into art. I've actually finished my piece ready for next meeting! This abstract features old fabrics, free machine stitching, acrylic paint and hand stitching on a painted canvas.

Country Applique

This week at TAAMMI we were making country applique with Julie Macdonald. For once I mostly followed the instructions! We used upholstery fabrics which have some great texture. All the lines are added with free motion stitching.

At the moment it's not really my kind of thing so, as I'm not too attached to it, I going to get out lots of glue, paint and texture paste and turn it into something else much more my mixed media style.

Needle-Felted Dyed Wadding

You may recall a while back that I decided to dye some wadding and use it for needle felting in place of expensive (but lovely!) pre-felts. The wadding has been out of the dye for a while now and today I started felting bits of wool fibres, acrylic felt, yarn, organza and even painted baby wipes to it. It works just as well as pre-felt and is quite a bit more robust. This is just an experiment, I'll see how it goes before dyeing some other pieces of wadding in a more considered way. Below you can see the wadding at the beginning with only a little wool fibre added - it's already quite colourful.

From Collage to Mono-Print

This month at The Embroiders Guild we were learning how to make a design for textiles using collage. Artist Helen Jones encouraged us to mix images, scale and colour to make an interesting composition.  I used some printed papers, photographs, paint charts and magazine images to make this collage.

The next stage was to trace and simplify the design before transferring it to fabric. I decided to use the collage for a multi layered Gelli® mono-print design on paper first.

I took several photocopies onto copy paper and also photocopied the design onto the actual cartridge paper I was going to be using for the print. Remember your print will be the mirror image of your design. Flip it on the photocopier if it is important that the image comes out the same way as the collage (if you are using text for example).

I cut some stencils out of my copies so I would be able to isolate sections of the print in different colours.

I used a Gelli® plate bigger than my final print size. I used masking tape to mark out where I would place my paper each time to ensure the layers would line up. I placed a copy under the plate to give me an idea of where I wanted to place each paint colour.

First up I made some backgrounds by rolling on acrylic paint and then scraping some off again with a rag. Here you can see the plate inked up and then the cartridge paper paced on top to pull the print (remember I have a copy of the image on top for later).

Here is the first background layer.

More layers were built up with rollers and commercial stencils.

Where I wanted a only specific shape to be coloured I placed a paper stencil on top to mask areas I didn't want to print. To save paint you only need to ink up the area that will be uncovered - I used the copy underneath as a guide for where to put the paint.

Here are the prints once all the different layers have been printed.

To make the black outlines I used block ink on a glass sheet; the Gelli® plate is too soft for this part when using paper, however it does work with fabric. I cut a generous mask to protect the background print from accidental black marks. The outlines were drawn from the back with a biro pen. Unfortunately my alignment with the print wasn't great - something else to fix in the next attempt!