Stamping...

...isn't something I do very often.  Mostly, that's because I don't like using other peoples' images or work.  I have never gone for the Somerset Studios variety of mixed media, that uses copyright free images, usually vintage.  There used to be an awful lot of it about, and it all looked the same.  Not my thing.  Sometimes, though, it's justifiable, usually when I want an effect that I can't reproduce myself; like this.

I can't imagine carving something as detailed as this; actually, as you know, I'm giving that sort of thing up, as soon as I've finished the current crop of lino blocks for the Spears and Shields series.  And sometimes I see a stamp that I Just Like, so I buy it.  Mostly, though, if I can't make it myself, I don't use it.

When I went into the studio this morning, I discovered, to my surprise, that the paint I'd mixed earlier in the week was still usable, thanks, I presume, to a combination of medium and clingfilm.  So I thought I'd try out the stamp, which arrived about a week ago.  I love text and the allusion of text or words...that's perhaps not all that surprising.  I've wanted a stamp like this for a very long time, but have never got round to buying one.  This one will do nicely.

So...I also discovered that I'd let the paint dry on the glass board I'd been using to roll out the paint for printing.  Unthinking, I dumped more paint on, and started to work.  Thoughtlessness and laziness are a deadly combination... look what happened....

That texture is the result of the dried-up paint being rehydrated, catching on the roller and peeling off.  This is Not A Good Thing.  Reader, I trust you will not be doing this, for lo, I am a Bad Example.  If I'd thought about it, I could have turned the board over before I started, and used the other side (I didn't).  So in the end, I scraped as much of the dried up paint as I could, before wiping the board with a floor wipe (face wipes really aren't big enough for studio use).  And I started again.

I wanted to start to build up a couple of layers, so took a piece of lutradur 120 which had already been coloured,  stamped the text on it, and then made a monoprint on top of that.  The monoprint was in two sections, as you can see from the photographs.

I think this has interesting textures.  The paint for the monoprint was added to an old lino block (the proper, traditional lino); it seemed to work fairly well.  And we're back to waiting for the machine to come home... I think a phone call on Monday will be in order, given that there's a queue building up.

Life's A Beach.

Well okay, these days, not so much.  But I decided to keep going with the piece from a couple of days ago, which made me think about the beach. A specific beach, in fact, the beach at Cramond.  When I was nine or ten, my mother was lent a flat right on the edge of the River Almond, and we spent the summer there.  My mother worked, so my sister and I were alone most of the week.  It was magical.  Actually, it was probably dangerous, my sister can only have been about six, and I had sole responsibility for her...but nothing untoward happened. 

Cramond is beautiful; I'm pretty sure that my love of beaches and the sea came from that summer.  So...this is a memory piece, and here's the memory :

endless summer

day on day the beach

sand between our toes

And here's the poem added to the piece, and some lutradur lace the colour of sand.

You know I don't like white... and this is just too stark.  Plus, I felt that the words were too dark, too stark a contrast against everything else. So, a little painting seemed to be in order.  First, I stamped some gold spirals into the centre of the 'sun', then dabbed three colours of metallic acrylic paint onto the background, giving this : 

Better?  Umm.  Different.  Possibly a bit cluttered, but it's too late to worry about it now.  And I'm still not happy.  So I stitched the words.  I'd been debating doing that ever since I added them, and finally succumbed.  It didn't take anything like as long as I thought it would, it adds a bit of texture and seems to somehow soften the overall effect of the writing, though the pen is still evident underneath. 

I've avoided writing on work for a very long time.  I started to learn calligraphy because I've been told so many times that my writing is abysmal.  It's a sort of cross between Russian and English handwriting, and not in a good way.  Finally, though, I decided that, like every other mark I make, it is authentic.  It's me.  And I do my best to be legible, on textile work at least.  Perfection is not required.  In fact, perfection is boring.  Hold that thought. 

And here's the finished piece.

The starfish was added for balance, and picks up some of the paler colours in the piece.  Am I happy now?  Meh.  It's not the best piece I've ever done, but I like the poem.  I'll put it away, now, and come back to it, see whether absence works its magic.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.  And if not, I'll throw it out...but I will keep the poem.

It's Raining, It's Pouring...

so I can't play in the garden, as I intended, but I can get on with working on the Brusho book, which is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm at the interesting moment in writing a book when I decide it's time to rewrite it altogether. I start with a structure in my mind, but nine times out of ten, I find that it doesn't work quite as well as I thought it would, so around the half way mark, I tend to go back and restructure it. I'm also adding photographs, which slows the work down a bit. Plus, I'm looking at the photos I've already taken, and deciding which are acceptable and which not. I've written a section on making watercolour washes, for example, but I feel the photos I have to illustrate it could be a lot better, so back to the drawing board on that one. And I'm picking up on other things that could be illustrated with a small but telling photograph, so I'm building a list of what I need to do next.

The image here shows two of the effects I've been experimenting with while writing the book. I didn't really understand how versatile Brusho is until I really started to work with it. This is a small image of a tree on mountboard, which has been stamped using thickened Brusho, on a background that was produced by printing on shaving foam. I'm quite pleased with the way it has turned out; I think it has movement and energy about it. It's as if the tree is dancing...or is that too fanciful?

This afternoon, though, I'm going to take a couple of hours to sit at my sewing machine and get some work done there. It's related to the Brusho book, admittedly, as I've prepared a painted flower on some cloth, which is ready to stitch into. I'll show you the results tomorrow.