Continuing my journey in mixed media, I painted and stamped a canvas board, added some collaged papers and lace, and drew all over it with black ink. The brown shading is done with Conte crayon. The text at the lower right was on a bit of scrapbook paper. It is the first three lines from a poem by Thomas Campion:
There is a Garden in her face,
Where Roses and white Lillies grow ;
A heau'nly paradise is that place.
I chose to interpret the poem quite literally! I like the colors and layering on this one, but might do something about that big green leaf that is pointing to the lady's face.
After reading through the Stitch Alchemy book by Kelli Perkins, I was moved to try constructing some fabric paper. On my first attempt, I ignored the suggestion to use muslin as the base. I had this old ugly piece of rust calico that I wanted to repurpose. I covered it in tissue papers, scrapbook papers, and magazine cutouts. The big yellow flower is some of my ill-fated hand-made paper that I painted.
This came out okay, but I disliked the areas where I had applied white tissue paper...and I thought the white and black diamonds were a little stark. I squirted a Tim Holz ink in "butterscotch" over almost the whole piece to give it a kind of glaze. Here is a section of it. The lovely lady was from a feature in the St. Louis magazine in our hotel.
This one would be my favorite, except that I got a lot of wrinkles right in the lady's face when it dried. I attribute this to being a rookie! I was using a 2-1 mixture of water to Allene's Tacky Glue to attach and seal the papers to the fabric base.
Next up, another green piece, this time intended to be ocean-themed. It is on a muslin base, but the fabric had been dipped in my turquoise rinse water from painting journal pages. The seaweed vine was drawn on Golden Threads paper, which I sometimes use for quilting designs on the long-arm. Everything else but the seahorse is just tissue paper layered over each other.
The next one is a modge-podge of tissue paper, fabric, and a graphic illustration I liked from the Wall Street Journal.
What will I do with any of this? Who knows? It's fun!
