Embroidered Collage

As promised, one of my monoprints turned into a deco.  I collaged on some sequin waste.  This glues down well with gel medium but needs to be completely flattened first.  And another collaged image enhanced with stitching for the second deco.

This was the first of these I tried.  I laid out the blue paint and scrubbed away the larger fish shape and the white squiggles, then laid the paper on top and ran over it with a brayer.  Then I went back and painted in the larger fish and a couple small fishies and printed that on top of my first image.  Then I added detail directly to the print with a paintbrush.  It sort of worked.

For this print I worked in a similar fashion to the first but deliberately moved the page around a bit between colors to get the overlapping fish.  I also added the swoops of green and printed those.

For this try I just applied all the colors at once, scrubbing a light layer of blue on with a paper towel before brushing on the fish.

One of these will be trimmed up and used for a deco cover before the end of the month.  I'm not sure which yet, or if there will be further ornamentation or modification to it.

One technique in monoprinting involves rolling out a surface of ink, putting the paper on top, and then impressing onto the paper with assorted blunt tools, including fingers, the wrong ends of brushes, toothpicks, and the like.  I didn't use my brayer to apply the acrylic paint but just scraped down with a piece of cardstock or brushed on a thin layer.  Maybe a thinner layer wouldn't have had as much transfer in the background area, but I like the way it turned out. 

I've been taking Kristi Schueler's printmaking class, although I've not done the assignments due to my travel schedule.  And I've been doing some reading.  And Zhenia posted interest in setting up a monotype atc or postcard exchange on the newly up nervousness forum.  So it was definitely time to explore some more.  I've split this evening's work into a couple posts.

  This is an abstract with a couple different layers.  The purple and yellow streaks were painted on my plastic surface.  Then I laid the paper down and ran the clean brayer over it.  Next I did a thin layer of a translucent gold in the same fashion.  Then added the purple rectangles by direct brushstrokes.

 

Here's the progress on my improvisational cross-stitch piece.  I extended the central motif vertically, but left the center clear and expect to fill it in differently.  I modified the options going sideways.  I'm not looking for complete symmetry.  I'm really happy with the border I designed since it incorporates both positive and negative versions of the little motif that keeps popping up.

These are the first four mandala drawings I did with assorted portable media.  They all came from the thoughts on the following sketchbook page.  I just sat on the plane and doodled into circles for a while on the way west.