Collage Papers

After my recent adventures with dying fabrics, I have been consumed with color!! I have been feeling the need to play and create colored papers and collage with the thought that I would create small journals to sell during the holiday season. You see, there is a method to my madness, I am thinking and working ahead to create some stock for the upcoming holidays while following my muse and having fun!! The planets don't align for me very often so when they do I MUST take full advantage!!
I wanted to ahve texture and lots of color but make things realtively simple. So I chose to start with gesso resist and acrylic paints. I cranked the above papers out in a couple of hours - these are the best ones, in my opinion but all will be used in some fashion.
Here are some tighter shots. (Left click on any picture to get a look at the details!)

This next piece is the large sheet of paper that I used to protect my work surface! I used sktech paper from a big pad for all of these. I just love the Serendipity of this sheet!!!

So I decided taht I would create another set of papers with simple bright color washes to complement the gesso resist papers and I would stitch the two sets of papers together n the sewing machine. This way I could avoid bubbling papers and not get everything all wet with glues. Plus the stitching would add more fabulous texture to each set of pages.

Next I had to think about covers for my little journals. I took some heavy watercolor paper and did some paint scraping and sponge work to come up with these two cover sheets.

All that I did was scrape paint over the surface using an old gift card. ( A favorite tool!)
For this next sheet it was all about color and a small sponge!

I found a sheet of collaged text that I had created awhile back and took the gift card and paint to it as well. There is a glare on this shot as the last layer that I added was a metallic blue. If you click on any of the pictures you can see all of the details, especially on this one. I will be able to get several covers from this one sheet.

Once I had painted up a storm, I took the frilled edges off of the full sheets of paper and saved them , of course!! Then I tore all of the sheets down to size and stitched a bunch of them together to create packs of pages with three sheets to each signature. (More on this aspect in a later post.)
After a round of stitching, I started to gather everything up and unearthed the bag of frill edges that I had put aside. I threw together a quick collage with the left over bits and this will become a cover as well. I think of all of the thigns that I created in this paint session, this piece is my favorite!!


So now I have lots of great pages all stitched for signatures, a bunch of painted papers yet to be torn and several really fun and different covers all ready to put together into journals. I have more work to do and I will share the finished journals with you very soon!!
have a great day!
Art On!!!!

Playing with Color!

We are having an extremely dry Fall here in VA. Our second round of water restrictions goes into effect this Monday, that means no more outside watering.It has also been very hot- we are all ready for some real Fall weather!

That said , the weather has been perfect for some fabric dyeing and sun prints. One must take advantage of weather conditions since we really never know when things will change!

These two pieces were done using a vintage linen napkin. I used ferns, Creeping Jenny and grasses to mask the dyed fabric. These pieces will be used in upcoming Journal Quilt projects for my Surface Design Group.

These pieces were done using regular muslin. The lacey effect is from a paper doiley and the flower prints are from Zinnia blossoms.

With the last bits of dye left in the pots, i dyed some laces and rims that I will use in various projects. I love having bits and pieces of dyed lace on hand as I never know when I will need it!

Most of these bits were purchased as odd pieces at antique stores and flea markets.

I finished off another Round Robin project today. I have been fretting about this piece for a long time. This Round Robin really sucked the artist right out of me- so many dropped out and several books were lost- it was very disheartening and very depressing. The gal whose book I was working in was very willing to wait for me to get motivated and to find my RR Muse again, so that was cool. I finally got inspired.

The book is large and has heavy black pages. the black pages were a bit dawnting. First I collaged some text pages and airline baggage tags on parts of each page. Then I did some paint scraping. this is what things looked like at that point.

So far , so good. At this point i decided that I was ready for some stretching- it was the perfect situation. If I really screwed up, I could just rip out the pages as there were many pages and I was the last artist to work in this book. I decided to play with some gesso with the thought that I would stamp over the gessoed parts. I did add the gesso but then I picked up a Sharpie Marker and didn't look back. Up till now I have felt so unsure about doing this sort of thing, but now the gate has been opened and the perverbial horse has left the barn!!!! I had so much fun with this piece and it is sooo different from things that I have produced before.

I will be doing many more projects like this one! I just hope that the gal who owns this book will like it as much!!!!