Did you ever have one of those days, where you know that you have a mountain of work to get through but somehow you manage to do everything else. I need to get this accordion book finished for Xmas but I ended up cleaning my studio, going to the art shop, picking my car up from the smash repairs taking my son to lunch and reading in the sunshine.
A nice day , I admit but not a practical day but perhaps that is what I needed. We all need those ramble days that circle in and out until you realize that this is just where you needed to be.
Now finally I am here, in my studio, but my head is not in the right space. It is time to do the practicalities. Cut out the cover boards (20.5 x 20.5) for the accordion book. I am cutting out the A4 pieces of tissue so they are ready to print on next time I am in the studio. Somehow I got so distracted that I ended up looking at idea videos on YouTube. I made a couple of awesome food dye color sprays…works quite well with water and a small amount of PVA as a thickener…for some reason when I added gloss medium to this mix it looked like it curdled so don’t do that. Great and definitely water resistant. Yep really distracted and this blog post is another distraction.
We’ll at least my studio is a bit more organized…no not clean as it is a working space…and ready for the ‘micro-movements’ (SARK) that I am capable of today I think I am going into holiday mode and my body just wants to stop.
So I decided to print some of the images for the accordion book, selecting from all the photos I took and the ones downloaded from Facebook friends. I want to print on tissue paper for the transparencies this creates. I have done this before but used spray adhesive on the printer paper to temporarily attach the tissue so it would go through the printer. Now to trial a different approach as I was told yup could just tape the paper on and put it through but this just jammed for me. I had used painters tape on the bottom and top corner. So my idea was to use the painters tape but to also run a line of double sided tape along the long edge of the A4 paper to secure the tissue. It worked beautifully. Yeah. I feel like today is a day for possibilities.
More layers to play with
Let the sunshine in.
I will need to combine this with normal photographs that I work into the image as the tissue paper prints are softer but I like the gentl feel of these images and think they will work well. It will be interesting to see how the transparent areas work with the established backgrounds. It’s nice when the experiments work and you can file the ideas away to use in other projects.
Now I mentioned the food dye sprays and my trip to the art shop. We’ll inspiration hit. I had done an experimental page with my spray dyes , had bought another 91.4 cm X 91.4 cm canvas and a couple of books from the op shop for collage. This is my latest background starting point and I am really enjoying the golden reds and oranges with the soft pthalo blues. A very nice distraction on a wabi-sabi day.
I hope your Xmas lead up is flowing smoothly and everything is falling into place. I will be wrapping presents tonight which is another lovely flowing activity as I sit wrapping and sipping a red.