Watercolour...

...isn't something I've worked with in a long time, but playing with Cara using Granny's Magic Crayons at the weekend inspired me to try them out on Lutradur XL.  I'm not a huge fan of acrylic on lutradur, because, unless it is thinned down to the nth degree, it blocks the little holes, which give it its transparency, in my view, its greatest asset.  Besides, it does unpleasant things to the hand of fabric, and I'm not overly keen on stitching through it.  By and large, I stick with transfer dyes for lutradur, because they do none of these things, and were designed specifically for colouring polyester.  But hey, a girl can try other things... and it's tiring, by my standards, to work with transfer dyes, because they have to be painted onto fabric, then ironed on.  Great results, and fixed, to boot...but needs must when the devil drives. 

So...I wetted out the lutradur with clear water, and started adding colour direct, mixing it on the cloth.  I chose red because there was some red dye already at the corner of the lutradur, so I wanted to work with that; watercolour wouldn't have covered it up, of course, being transparent.  The risk of doing that is that you don't like what you get... and I didn't... so I took a monoprint of sorts from the wet paint. 

I didn't bother to unscrunch the paper, hence the white tree shape to the left hand side, and the crackle texture of the print in general, which I rather like.  It got rid of a fair amount of the paint, and I was able to continue...and finally made this...

This was taken while it was still wet; it will dry slightly paler, but hopefully not too much.  I'm planning to add another wash to the reverse side, so that this can become a book after stitching.  No, you're right, it's not particularly interesting at this point...but it has lots of room for stitch...and possibly some applique... we'll see.  I then went on and played a bit more with a block of lino and some paint, to make a selection of monoprints.  I don't have enough energy for lino cutting, so that seemed to be the best way of using the block...

I did some prints on paper, some on lutradur, the last image is the one I like best, but, like the painting, it has plenty of room for stitch.  Should keep me out of mischief for a while...

Playing With Cara...

...as I did on Monday (school holiday), resulted in Granny's Magic Crayons.  She likes drawing...here's my favourite of what she produced. 

So, when she got fed up, and moved on to something else, I had a turn.  'Oh, that's beautiful, Gran', she said, 'It's awfully big, though'.  Err...it's A4... everyone's a critic...

It's really just a doodle....so, when I wanted to refresh my memory as to how to make a slightly different folded book, this was what I used.  First, though, I had to draw on the reverse...

You can see the difference adding water makes; it softens the lines, and spreads the colour over the piece.  So... folded once down the vertical centre line, and three times, equally, across the horizontal, then flattened out, plus a single cut down three quarters of the central line...and hey presto!  a folded book.

I find it intriguing, how the pattern, already abstract, becomes even more so, once folded.  It's unpredictable.  I have to say, I prefer the blue side, rather than the yellow, but they sit well together.  Shall I add words?  Probably not...not convinced I have anything to say about this piece, just a bit of frivolity, really, to remind me how this particular book sits. 

Playing About...

...with the watercolour crayons again.  For quite a while, I've been wondering why my paintings are so unlike my textiles, notably, these garden paintings such as 'Summer Garden', which hangs in my living room.  I have made several garden quilts; a series called 'Dawn In The Healer's Garden', which, astonishingly to me, don't appear on this blog, except in this little glimpse... from which you can see that the quilts appear to be significantly more structured than this painting, although, interestingly, the intention behind both approaches was the same.  I wanted to suggest a series of random glimpses of colour and movement that is possible in a garden, particularly a cottage garden, where flowers are grown en masse, and wave in the wind. 

I went out for half an hour yesterday, which has left me too damn tired to do anything with textiles, but the crayons and a sketchbook were to hand, so I thought I'd play with them, to replicate this sort of look.  Only to discover that it wasn't really possible...or not in the way I was working...

I think the problem is the type of mark it's possible to make with crayons.  They're not as easy to manipulate as paint, or maybe I'm just too lazy, or too tired, to make the kind of small mark that I was aiming for.  This drawing makes me think, not of a garden, but of a distant forest in autumn... or it did, until I applied water, and then it all went to hell in a handcart.  I had expected a bit of muddying of the clear colours that the crayons give, but what I wasn't expecting was the brush to moult.  Substantially. Which you can't see in the image below, but trust me, there's lots of the little blighters.  Growl.  I suspect I would have got the result I wanted, had I been able to spray the paint with water, rather than using a brush....but we'll never know.

You've heard me say that 'nothings succeeds as planned' frequently throughout the life of this blog.  I can actually see some potential for further work, though... not done in this way, though.  It's possible to make monoprints using watercolour crayons; in truth, that's why I bought them in the first place, it's just that I never actually tried it.  I can see that blocks of colour would be really interesting... possibly combined with a bit of collage.  So it's not all lost.  Play is never a waste of time; there's always something to learn.  Hurrah.