Experimenting or playing?

Whichever it is, it's what I was doing!

I put a very thin layer of black acrylic paint on the gel plate and smoothed a magazine page onto it.  It needs to be black and white with high contrast.  When I pulled the magazine page off the pattern from the page is left on the plate.  After leaving it to dry, I put a thin layer of white acrylic paint and put a piece of wet strength tissue on and left it to dry over lunch.  This is the print and will be useful in collage.

Then I did the same but put blue paint as the first layer rather than black.  I also took headlines from Towpath Talk which is a newspaper and put them onto the gel plate.  After burnishing I pulled off the newspaper and the print is on the gel plate.  Again I put a thin layer of white acrylic paint and a piece of paper on and left to dry.

I had used a piece of leftover watercolour paper over the plate when I was smoothing the paper onto the plate for the blue pattern before I added the headlines.  This gave me this blue frame.  I used gel medium to pull the print of the pattern left on the plate.

I added more headlines to the gel plate.

I used transparent paint to pull the print.

I also tried putting some bondaweb through my printer.  After a couple of abortive attempts I set the printer to envelope.  I had taped the piece of bondaweb still on its backing sheet to a piece of thin card.  You can see at the bottom where I have pulled off some of the bondaweb.

I'm hoping to be able to iron bits of the printed bondaweb onto some silk noil which already has marks on it.

I'm planning on making the silk noil into a fabric book.  These are some of the pages.

If you're interested in playing with the gel plate I can thoroughly recommend Yeates Makes on YouTube.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

So where was I?

Oh that's right.  I was working on Free Up Your Sketchbook with Karen Stamper in between making collages.

Although there was some collaging onto the pages.  Plus mark making with pens and pencils and Artgraf.

And in week 2 we added acrylic paint.  Only black, white and payne's grey.

This week, week 3, we had to choose one colour and collage bits of paper in that colour.

 

 

And then paint over with shades of orange plus some black and grey.

I liked being back with colour.  I deliberately chose orange as a change from turquoise.  Although you all know turquoise and orange are my go-to colours.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Collage

I've been spending time making collages.  This was inspired by a 10 day class called Collage Makers Summit organised by @drewsteinbrecher.  He had organised 9 other collage artists to join him with a different collage idea each day.  One of the ideas was to use your own photos, and one was to use black and white plus a pop of colour.  A third tutor gave us sketches of layouts we could use.

So I put all three ideas together.  I printed out black and white versions of my canal photos and chopped them up.  I made these six 10cm square collages.

Kellee Wynne introduced the idea of grid collages.  She is currently offering a free course Grid Journal Mini Course.

These are 7cm square collages using my gel prints.  You draw out the grid and work on all of the squares at once with a limited palette of papers.  It makes for a really cohesive collection.

Then I made these four 10cm square collages with the gel prints but adding in some of my photos.

I may go back and add some marks with pens or markers.  I don't think there's sufficient contrast so I may use black.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice