Day: May 13, 2020

Experimenting in my Sketchbook

I had quite a good time today with the experiments that I did, actually producing quite nice results that I am happy with.

Collage and Acrylic

I led on from the work I did yesterday with outlines and skeletons, but I added the collage element into it to give it a more interesting background. I was able to use black paint then because the detail and colour of the backing paper stood out enough so black was a good contrast colour over the top. I particularly like the use of the old book paper, the colour of it is great and the writing is so small that it does look more like a pattern.

Bleach and Batik

While using paint on the leaf skeletons to add colour, i thought about how bleach removes colour, and managed to get quite an interesting print of it here removing the colour of the tissue paper, as well as adding as a resist when watercolour was added over the top of it. The batik was fun to experiment with, and I got quite a nice clear image from it using the wax, I wonder if there is a way to mix these two techniques and take things further maybe with both of them.

The first image shows playing with wet paint and clingfilm which did create some nice results, this is similar to what i did using the leaves yesterday to create a resist-ish technique to capture the lines and shape as it dries. Again I think this could work combined with batik or something, but I may need to find a harsher way of making the impressions into the paint.

Bleach, Batik and Collage

I found doing the experiments with leaf skeletons quite fun, and went to bed thinking of ways that I could try and play around with this further. I thought about bleach firstly, because I thought I could just paint it onto the leaf like I was able to do with the paint and print it onto a coloured surface.

So the bleaching involved painting on the underside of the leaf where the veins are more prominent. Then using this I firmly pressed it on the tissue paper and a blank piece of paper to try and paint over later to add as a resist. The removal of the tissue paper colour came out way better than I thought it would, my experience with bleach before is that it seeps and runs very easily.

Batik Experiments

Batik was quite enjoyable, I usually use a large pot on the stove but found there was usually a lot of wax left over from this and no where to really store it as I do not do it very often, so I decided to use a little candle here which worked out well. I painted the design outline around with the wax which dried pretty much straight away so it had to be applied very quickly. I then painted over this with watercolour and as you can see, it avoided the wax and just slipped of it. When the paint had then dried, I ironed the top of it with a piece of newspaper over the top, which melted the wax and the newspaper takes away most of it. I then did the same thing on the back to try and remove as much as I could. I also painted wax on the edges of a leaf and on the veins of it as well, I gave this a quick burst under the iron onto paper, which transferred the shape across which is basically the closest thing to getting the leaf skeleton done in batik.

Using a mix of old and patterned papers I made a few collages here with the effects of ripping the papers into shapes and layering them up, adding pen or ink then over the top adds an interesting effect to them and makes them seem more complete. Finally the last two images show a clingfilm print, painting wet watercolour on paper and then putting scrunched clingfilm over the top until it dries. I then cut this into the shape of the leaf, and with the one before, I left the shape of the leaf in it in the clingfilm and just scrunched the areas around it.

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