Textiles

Paper and coloured inks...

The teacher explained that Textiles isn't all about fabric and sewing; it can be a place to experiment with all kinds of materials: wood, metal, paper, concrete...

In the next few sessions, we're going to be making altered books.  This involves cutting up an old book and painting it, pasting in drawings and prints, sticking pages together, making pockets -- anything we feel like doing.  Although it has to be about the term's theme of Food and Drink.   Mostly, I feel very excited about this.  I'm usually in the 'books are precious and must be preserved' camp, but I'm also interested in book art and I suppose if a grotty old book is only good for throwing away, why not alter it, make it into an art work and give it a new life?

This lesson was a chance to play with coloured inks.  Some of the papers or ideas could be re-used in our books later on.

Splattering on inks. I was impressed by how the yellow doesn't disappear, as it would with watercolour, but holds its own amongst the darker colours.

The teacher showed us that if you soak the paper and scrunch it up, it can have a lovely, soft cloth-like texture.  Of course, this made the splatter work go blurry.

I loved what the ink was doing on the newspaper next to my work.

I tried to recreate the effect on this crepey piece of paper, but it didn't look as magical as when it happened naturally.

Layering on different papers, playing with a theme of numbers and swirls.

Playing with a wax candle, washes, sponges and layering on tissue paper.

I had the idea of scraping away the wet surface with a scalpel, to make an upraised textured surface which caught the light in interesting ways. 

I thought the white dots it created on the blue paper were pretty, like rain or flowers.

I coloured in the white patches here with a yellow wash. These would make great backgrounds for illustrations.

Here I stuck on tissue paper and scraped that, which lessened the chance of ripping right through the paper.