Embroidered Collage

The intent with these papers was to use the fluid properties of the acrylic inks to create organic patterns, as I had done once before on a small piece.  It didn't quite work out as planned.  For my substrates I chose two less than successful sheets from when I'd been playing with watercolor crayon monoprinting. 

I dribbled some ink with the eye-dropper on the ghost image and started tilting the page this way and that, getting some movement.  Then I added another color - which promptly moved into the already wet paths of the first color, obliterating it!  I kept going, getting impatient along the way and blotting with the paper with the primary image.  After I had some interesting patterns, I let the ghost image dry and kept adding to the primary image.  Then I scrubbed a layer of silver paint unevenly over the ghost image, creating the top paper in the picture.  For the bottom paper I just made sure I had enough dribbling over the pattern that was already present to be interesting.

I think that the ink did not pool and swirl as I expected because of the paper I used.  These were both absorbent watercolor papers. Last time I tried this I had glued a page of text to a page of cardstock so more of the ink would have stayed on the surface to be moved around.  I do have some other unsuccessful works I could recycle, but I'll likely use a different technique on them.  9 down, 21 to go.