Water in Ink and Watercolour

On Wednesday when the rest of the group went to Arncliffe to paint, feeling rather rough, I retired instead to the birdhide with watercolours, inks and a flask of coffee.
I was entertained by the Coots courting and chasing off Great Crested Grebes but applied myself to trying to capture the solidity of the branches in the water contrasted with their liquid reflections and the constant changes in the direction and colour of the ripples.


Fascinating if frustrating exercise! I took lots of photos so I'm going to try and analyse the colours and shapes in some more watercolour sketches.
I'll be back at Malham in August on a watercolour course( including making our own paints) so good to get some practice in!

Stick and Ink

After dinner on Tuesday, we set off for the birdhide overlooking Malham Tarn, armed only with ink ( acrylic in my case) hunting for a stick along the way.
I hadn't considered sketching from a hide before but it's very convenient (apart from the insects ) being under cover with a shelf for materials and a seat to prop yourself on( glad I took my Therm-O Rest Cushion though).Katherine suggested using a long strip of paper to draw the panoramic views.

Some areas work better than others
Besides the stick I used a dip pen, a reed pen and a brush, also a water mister. For the water shown below I used a Pentel waterbrush over drawn lines.
Most of my sketching I do with a technical pen such as Profipen 0.5 or PITT artists pens rather than pencil -I'd forgotten the joy of dipping in an ink pot and the variety of line and texture achieved. A technique to explore further - if only I could do it without coating my fingers too.

Even More Honesty Experiments

This piece was again based on honesty , trialing iridescent acrylic medium and inks, with the work of Ian Mckeever very much in my mind

I harvested honesty seeds from our garden - besides having some in a jam jar in my studio area in the conservatory , I also placed some in a wedding present vase in the dining room. It's amazing how varied they look - in different vessels and lighting condition. I wanted to convey both transparency and multiple layers and scales.

The background was assembled from a variety of materials: silks; fabric with an honesty seed print; pieced patchwork in a range of greys. This was overlaid with photos of honesty printed onto organza, machine quilted with metallic thread in ovals.

This was then painted with four ovals of liquitex iridescent medium mixed with Golden acrylic paint (white and yellow ochre) with top layer of pearlescent acrylic ink, with shapes outlined in burnt umber acrylic ink. Trimmed and finished to 12 x 12 inch size for December CQ Journal Quilt

This has a lot of potential for larger scale work. I liked building up the complexity from the background to the foreground, from distance to close-up views. Although a lot of the detail got lost or was covered over , it adds richness to the final piece eg the variety of fabrics soaked up the paint to differing degrees. This piece is very much about the progression of process - one of the most satisfying and exciting in a long time.

More Honesty Experiments

I've been carrying out a series of experiments using Liquitex iridescent medium and paints using honesty seeds as the inspiration. This piece started out life as a machine quilting sampler, then first trials of acrylic paint application and currently layers and layers of pearlescent paint and acrylic inks.

Intermediate stage

Final stage - closeup

The final layer was neat pearlescent ink- it looks rather harsh in some lights but like oversalting soup to find the right seasoning levels, sometimes you have to push the limits to know how to do it better next time.

October TIF - 12 Treasures

This month the challenge is to think about your textile work space. How do you feel about this space? What role does it play in your life? I wrote a post about this here but the real challenge was how to interpret this in textiles. I've had very little creativity this month but I have been doing a lot of sorting out - not only in my work room but also some of the miscellaneous boxes still lurking in the cellar ( so that's where my 'Paintstik' oilbars were!) Among the items I found was an old (Victorian?) silk velvet patchwork item , pieced quite coarsely over silk net , purchased at a Region 1 Area day. The dark blue/black fitted in with the colour palette for this month -I decided to use part of it to frame photos printed on fabric of some of the things I like about my studio space , some of my treasures. This was then mounted on a piece of silk ikat. Treasures 1-6 : quilt and textile reference books; Bernina Virtuosa 160 sewing machine(only 1 new circuit board and major de-fluff in 10+ years devoted service ) ; hand sewing threads ( mixture of old silks and ethically sourced hand dyed cotton perle ); Valdini and Oliver Twists variegated machine threads; Malaysian woven basket acquired at breakdown of World Orchid Show 1993 (used for storing rolls of paper etc); acrylic inks.

Treasures 7-12: Liquitex acrylic paints; a small glimpse of my extensive fabric stash; 'humbug' triangular pincushion stuffed with sheeps wool circa 1980 - made by my mum, great design as it doesn't roll around and the natural oil in the wool prevents rusting; needlepoint sewing case , also made by my mum, the closest I got to a Turkish carpet until I went travelling several years later; watercolour sketchbooks from my travels; my computer!!!

Experiments in Acrylic Inks

One discovery on my recent painting course in Malham was the versatility of acrylic inks , both for drawing and adding different effects to mixed media . A piece of kit that Katherine uses a lot is a Dahlia Mister which delivers a fine controllable water mist, used to move paint and ink around the surface, even to draw with. She graciously allowed us to borrow it and on any excursion, Dahlia came too and there would be frantic calls of 'where's Dahlia?' when we'd come to a crucial point. They are however rather expensive so I was experimenting instead with a £2.95 Ideen 'Funpump' from Art Van Go. My palette of inks has also increased to include Sepia and Payne's Grey (much less harsh than black)

I have it in mind to try a scale up of the studies I did of Gordale Scar ( detail above) on fabric, planning initially some Journal Quilt trials of sections of rock. My first experiments with Payne's Grey and the 'Funpump' were on watercolour paper(below) - I love the feathering you get and the separation and granulation of the ink. The 'Funpump' was not as controllable as a Dahlia mister but was still superior to a standard spray bottle being slightly pressurised. For practising on fabric I had a sample of 3 different fabrics sown with a variety of machine and hand stitching and then painted over with acrylics. The result had been very boring and I'd attempted to cut it and re-assemble with no noticable improvement - nothing to lose in drenching it in inks.
The results pictured here are rather interesting. Although any glimpse of the underlying fabric has been lost, the ink has concentrated in the stitching and emphasised it. Ian has already ear-marked it for his office - it reminds him of the snowy landscapes we saw in Northern Iran . I thought it looked coastal but I suppose that's the beauty of abstracted landscape, each viewer sees something different.
The combination of ink and water mist acted quite differently on fabric compared to paper. I thought the acrylic painted areas might act in a similar way being water resistant but most of the ink soaked through along the stitching lines as you can see from the back!
And a considerable amount soaked into my unsealed drawing board - a thing of beauty in itself but I'm afraid I'll have to scrub it off . Might print the photo on fabric though.
What I might try for my next experiment is painting some fabric with gesso before and after stitching to see if that resists the soaking through, to seal my drawing board or failing that, putting a piece of fabric or paper underneath to absorb the watered inks.