Mixed Media

This week, I worked on my mixed media pieces for Karen's 3rd Quarter Challenge on the Felting and Fiber Studio Site. The first piece I worked on was the smaller board with lots of folded and creased scrim on. I started by painting the background with some blue shades of acrylic paint.

Then I layered lots of shades of blue and white, then finished with some details of black, white, yellow and red. This is the piece just after I finished, while it was still wet.

And this is it when it is dried. You can't really see the texture in the photo, you might be able to if you click to see it bigger, but I've uploaded it to flickr, so you can see the texture of the scrim and the detail better.

Here's a supermacro of a small part which does show some of the texture:

Often when I work with acrylics, I need to wipe off excess paint, so I keep a spare painting board nearby to wipe the paint on there. It makes a great base for another painting. This isn't really part of the challenge, but I painted it just after the blue piece. It's mostly the same colours, but in different amounts.

 And a supermacro:

 The second piece I worked on was the larger board with 2 layers of scrim. It did turn out the way I'd planned, but didn't look as good as I'd imagined. I painted a light grey in the centre and dark greys around the edges. Then I covered some laser prints of artwork in Golden gel medium and stuck them face down on the surface. When they were dried the next morning, I wet them and carefully rubbed off the backing paper to reveal the prints. I covered in gel medium then painted reds, oranges, yellows and whites around the edges. I don't think I got enough paper off the bottom print. I might carry on working on this, I think it needs something else.

Has anyone else made anything for the challenge? If you post a link, we can add it to the gallery there.

Fabric Notebook Cover and Studio Challenge

I've finally made a start on a couple of pieces for Karen's 3rd Quarter Mixed Media Challenge on The Felting and Fiber Studio site. I chose two different types of background, the first one is a 7 x 5 inch art board, I think it is meant for watercolour paints. These are boards with a textured paper surface.

I covered this with Weldbond glue then added some cotton scrim, I added some Golden gel medium and added some more scrim, making creases, gathers and folds. Then I covered it in Gesso.

The next background is hardboard, the same kind of thing pegboard for workshops is made out of. I got some 8 x 6 inch pieces cut years ago for making polymer clay mosaics.

I covered this in Weldbond glue, added a layer of scrim, then glued another layer of scrim on top. I covered this in Gesso too. They are both almost dry, waiting for me to forget to finish them ;)

I finished another fabric collage notebook cover last week. This is a small A6 one. This is the front:

And this is the back:

I used some flowery fabric to line the inside, and used the sewing machine to attach the flaps, then hand-stitched blanket stitch around all the edges.

It's probably not quite as effective as zig-zagging with the machine, but it's helps stop the fabric fraying.

Fabric Collage Notebook Cover

I had 3 more pieces to finish before I could put my sewing stuff away. They are all notebook covers made from fabric collage pieces I made a few years ago. I thought it was a waste to have them all rolled up and put on a shelf out of the way. I managed to get the parts that needed to be machine stitched all sewn up, and now I just need to finish off the edges by hand. I did finish one yesterday. It was from a collage of autumnal rusty colours. It's mostly fabric, but has some art yarns sewn in too. I used some braid and delrin clips to make a closure.

This is the back:

I had a really nice fabric piece that I'd used as part of the collage piece and used this for lining to hide all the stitches:

I thought I'd have a few pictures of the other part finished pieces, but it's been raining and been really dark, but they were made from multi coloured collages. Hopefully they'll be finished over the weekend, but here's a supermacro just because :)