More gothic than Venice

On Thursday Roger & I went to St. Albans - a place we had never visited before.  It has the most amazing cathedral.  I don't much care for cathedrals but this one had medieval wall paintings and tremdous architecture which reminded me of my Venice sketchbook and Michelle Ward's gothic stencils.

Some of the brickwork patterns reminded me of La Mezquita in Cordoba.

And this made me think of interesting decay in textile pieces.

I belong to Workshop on the Web created by Maggie Grey.  Each month there are several textile ideas form a variety of artists.  In the March issue Gillian Cooper provided a phototutorial on 'A mixed-media approach to surface design' which involved gelli plate printing on fabric.

I love gelli prints but usually do mine on a variety of paper surfaces.  So I had a go and ended up with these two lovely pieces of fabric.

The first prints of each of these came out really dark so I took each piece and using cellulose glue put a layer over the top.

This is the original piece of fabric and a piece of repair tissue

which combined to be this and I added some extras.

 These two - fabric and teabag paper

combined into this image.

At present I'm not sure where this will lead but I am planning to try some sketchbook work!  Shock, horror!

I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

More from my Venice project

I saw this blog post by Anna-Karin Evaldsson and thought I could do something similar for my Venice sketchbook.

Apart from the fact that I didn't have the same stencils, colours of paint or ink pads - but that aside I'd give it a go.  I stuck some Italy related bits and pieces that I had bought from Julie Kirk - she made this pack especially for me.  I painted over it with a yellow acrylic mixed with glaze medium.

I stencilled some brown paint.

Added some more stencilling with a flesh colour acrylic.

Stamped randomly over it all

Stencilled again and decided it was all rather brown.

So I mixed some yellow glaze and put it over the top and then decided it was too yellow!

So painted grey over it and then wiped some of it off.

I had mixed a lot of the yellow glaze so I stencilled a piece of Deli paper with it.

 I used gel medium to glue some pieces of painted repair tissue onto it.

I used some stamps designed by Michelle Ward and then I started on the red paint.  I read the instructions again - I wonder why really because apart from the number of layers it's nothing like Anna-Karin's piece.  Anyway she had said use texture paste.

I mixed the red paint with the fibre paste - which of course made it a bit pink!  Anyway, I stencilled the shapes with the fibre paste and then when it was dry tried to darken it with black paint and then lighten it with buff white.

By this time, I decided I'd be better off leaving it alone for a bit.  I will come back to it when I decide what it needs.  It's not saying Venice to me yet.

What would you do with it?

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

PS: If you would like to look back at the pages of my Venice sketchbook to date click on Venice in the list below.

Venice project

Regular readers may remember that at the end of 2015 I started a sketchbook project on Venice.  I wrote several blog posts including one about a zigzag book inspired by Michelle Ward plus how I used the sketchbook inspiration in the Cas Holmes weekend I went to.

Last Friday I went to Ineke Berlyn's studio where we can work on our own projects and she comes round and encourages each of us and makes suggestions about how to extend the work.

I started with the piece of fabric I had printed at her studio on a previous visit.  I can't believe that was last March.

I used stencils, thermofax screens and fabric paint to add more pattern to the fabric.  When I showed Ineke two of the pieces I made at the Cas Holmes workshop she suggested that I could make a book using these as pages.

I tore the fabric I had printed into page size pieces

And started laying pieces of paper and fabric on top

As I was printing the fabric I also printed into my sketchbook so now I have more pages to work into in the sketchbook as well as the fabric pages.

This spread shows folded pages

now opened up.

The image on the right is a scan of the original drawing and the page on the left is the print I took from the original watercolour.

More sketchbook pages on the go

It will be interesting to see what happens with these backgrounds.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Continuing the Venice project Cas Holmes style!

Yesterday I skimmed the surface of the Cas Holmes workshop.  On Saturday morning I started before the workshop officially began with this

I went through the previous afternoon's exercise which resulted in this.

Once the workshop had got going Cas suggested I traced over the image and cut myself a mask.  I glued the tracing to a piece of tracing paper that I had already used on the gelli plate and ended up with this.

I put it on some thin cotton fabric and printed with some lace and brushed some paint off the mask onto the fabric.

Cas had shown us how to print with found objects and had given us some lace to print with.  The pattern on the lace on the right reminded me of the brickwork pattern on the Doges Palace in Venice.

We printed on a variety of surfaces and in the afternoon Cas showed us how to collage these together with paste.  We needed to let these dry over night.

I also pasted a collage into my sketchbook.   I had taken with me some of my gelli prints.

We also collaged a piece by pinning the pieces so that we could stitch into them during the drying time of the other pieces. This is upside down while I was working into it.

On Sunday we continued working into our pieces.  This was a narrow piece drying.

I borrowed a machine to add covers to a book I decide to make.  I used a gelli print I had done on black paper to make the covers.

I continued to work into the other pieces during the day ending up with this collection of work.

I love this piece that looks like a remnant.

I'm excited to see where all this leads.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice