I am currently preparing work for 5 different exhibitions, which has given me an inclination and an opportunity to try out a few slightly different ways of working. One of these is working direct to canvas or paper, rather than working onto a wadded/quilted background. However - one of the reasons I choose to work with textiles and quilts, is I just love the texture these materials and practices produce. So a flat canvas was not appealing. I spied some textured craft papers in the Works, when buying canvas, and decided to see how I could use them as potential backgrounds. So here is a first try out - stage by stage ..
I started with a blank canvas and glued the textured papers down after cutting them into squares ... you can tell I am a patchworker! ...
covered it all in a fairly liquid gesso(liquitex)
added setacolour pale blue and some iridescent acrylic medium and covered the canvas again
which gave us this ..
quite nice, so decided to try out some images ... these are all prints from the gelli plate
feeling background too blue, so added a glaze of setacolour wine and some interference gold
Oooh - wet! .... blotted with a paper ... which gave this little bonus
and resulted in this .....
decided to add some liquid acrylic ink in black
which after spraying with water and blotting a bit, looked like this
hmmmm ... too dark, so went all over top again with almost dry coat of original blue setacolour
I also stitched into the imagery papers at this stage - and then tried them out
settling on this arrangement
too blue again, so added back a very little wine colour with water soluble crayons
and then rubbed over with my very favourite water resistant neocolour crayons in white, to bring the patterns back a little and add emphasis
Now for some hand stitch .. but the dog is moithering for a walk now .. so tomorrow I think ... hope to talk soon - Hilary x
