from start to finish!
some people have asked what i do to the muslin before i paint it with watercolors, or how i glue it to the page, or when i glue it to the page... here's what i do. nothing about the process is precise or particular -- no matter what you do it'll look great!
1. wash muslin in the washing machine to take out the sizing. i like to buy muslin that has a tight weave because it makes for a smoother working surface. most stores have bolts of different qualities and weights of muslin - compare the weaves and pick one that's tightly woven unless you want to work on a rougher surface.
2. rip it up to the size of your page (or whatever size you want).
3. soak the pieces of muslin in walnut ink & water. i use walnut ink crystals - i fill a bowl with water, sprinkle some crystals in and stir. i soak the muslin anywhere from an hour to overnight -- it doesn't seem to make much difference in how dark it gets.
4. wring the walnut ink water out of the muslin -- don't rinse, it just washes away most of the stain. while i have the pieces of muslin in my hand, i sprinkle some crystals here and there to add more walnut ink action. smudge it around - or not.
5. lay the pieces somewhere to dry.
6. now start using your muslin to wipe excess acrylic paint off your brushes, stencil them, stamp them -- whatever you want to get some color and interest going. any and all excess paint that i have while i'm working goes onto a piece of muslin.
this is what my pieces look like at this point.
7. when these pieces are dry, add some watercolor paint. i dip the muslin in my water cup and rub the wet spots in watercolor paint. or you can use a brush... you want a lot of pigment so the color'll bleed up through the acrylic paint at the end.
8. when the watercolors are dry put a layer of gel medium (or mod podge, or pva glue, or whatever - they all seem to work the same) on your journal page. lay the muslin down, and, if you want a smooth surface, use a brayer to adhere it. if you want lumps and bumps just press it down with your fingers. let this dry.
9. squirt some off-white paint (my favorite is 'light buttermilk' by americana) on the page, and with a dripping wet brush, cover the page. if you need more paint just squirt more on there. i like it to be pretty watery so the paint isn't too opaque. if you have an area that looks too covered up, just spray it with water and wipe some of the paint off. let this dry and you're done!
this is what the pieces above looked like after the 'light buttermilk' paint... they aren't glued down to a journal page, but you get the idea...
watercolors, colored pencils, ink, and oil pastels all work great on this surface. it's a 'toothy' surface so it really grabs the pigment from colored pencils and oil pastels. and you don't have to use a pale neutral color in the last step - or you can use more than one color. i don't stick with just one way on every page.
~ ~ ~
if you want to make a Barely There Book...
follow the steps above, skipping # 8 and doing step 9 to both sides of the muslin. then stitch the pages together... one thing to remember when putting the acrylic on (step 9) is that a less watery mixture will let you paint with watercolors on both sides of the page -- there will be very little or no bleedthrough. heh, but that bleedthrough can be a really nice thing... another option is to coat the pages with matte gel medium.
XO
book
the little muslin book from last week's post... i said it was going to be my new 'wandering journal'. HA! i've hardly been able to pull myself away from it! six pieces of muslin, no paper - it's barely there...
i used oil pastels,
and a china marker.
i stitched...
painted with watercolors
and loved it when they bled through to the back side of the page.
colored pencil, watercolor paint, and a little plaster on the tree trunk.
i glued...
the black lines are from a china marker, smudged around. i discovered that you can use oil pastels with stencils. that's the stencil i used under the book -- i just filled in most of each diamond with oil pastels
then used tortillons to smudge it around until it totally filled in each spot. i used the totillons a lot to blend and smush the oil pastels into the muslin. the muslin gets wonderfully soft when you do this.
yep, i've already started another one! this one has 11 pages, which just about maxes out my sewing machine...
i've had some questions about what i do to the muslin, so in a couple of days i'll put up step-by-step directions for my non-picky, very unparticular process. i'm putting it in a separate post so i can put a link to it in the sidebar under 'tutorials'. thank you everyone for your kind words about these muslin pages!
this is the first time in my entire 50+ years that i've had a cactus that's actually *grown*. wow! that really impresses me...
danny gregory, 'the creative license'
this week's art wisdom comes from danny gregory in one of my favorite journaling books, 'the creative license'.
How many ways can you draw shadows, reflections, textures, and midtones?
Experiment with cross-hatching -- vertical, horizontal, thick, thin, overlaid, intersecting, parallel.
Stipple with dots, squares, dotted lines, hash marks.
Try drawing more details in the shadowed areas and leaving the highlights as plain paper.
XO
to flowers
ahhh, it's still hot...
these are from my 5" x 7" journal... muslin that's been gel medium-ed to 140# watercolor paper and then painted with (mostly : ) watercolors.
and the last pages
in my little (3" x 5") travel journal. i should probably call it my 'wandering journal' since it's what i take with me when i go out walking. i started it almost exactly 3 years ago, which was also when i started keeping art journals. as i've said before, i wanted to finish this so i could start a new, bigger journal, but now i'm not sure if i'll go to bigger pages or not. lately i've painted a page every morning as i sit outside, and i've enjoyed the small page size...
since i mostly drew with my left hand in this book, it wasn't easy to draw on the last pages!
for now this is my new 'wandering journal'... i sewed together 7 pieces of muslin...
some of the pages are narrow so i sewed tabs on these pages that would meet the left side of the wider pages. it weighs practically nothing, so it's great for wandering in that regard. i'll let you know what i think after i've done a few pages!
what the flowers are starting to do here, in our non-yard yard and everywhere...
and this, this is so lovely that i wanted to share it with you... it's a big chunk of lavender rose quartz from the mt. shasta area. it was given to me by some generous rock hounds years ago. i sit beside it in the morning, and it's luminous as the sun shines on it... to give your eyes (and heart) a real treat, click on the photo...
Paris Through My Window, 1913, Marc Chagall
we went to redding this week where i got two new taschen art books in the bargain section at barnes and noble. one is about chagall, and the other is about miro. the image quality in both is excellent, and i've already read the chagall book from cover to cover. it was just a matter of choosing what to quote...
'Chimie' was a word Chagall especially liked using from the early 50s onwards and which, to preserve the special coloration of his language, is better left untranslated. With this word he meant everythig that happens to the material with the forming hand ofthe artist - almost a process of alchemical transmutation. "The 'great chimie' leads one to community with nature, the 'lesser chimie' to community with man."
Chagall maintained: "I consciously seek [...] to construct a world where a tree can be different, where I myself can suddenly discover that I have seven fingers on my right hand, but only five on the my left - basically a world where everything is possible."
from 'Chagall', by Jacob Ball-Teshuva
XO
every second
ooohhh, i've been having so much fun playing with muslin... and being in the sun...
these pages are from my journal, all painted on muslin... i love *pencil* on muslin!
this page has a coat of watered down gesso on it because i didn't like the colors i originally painted the bird. sob, sob! the background was so cool before i covered it up! i like the bird now, though... he's mostly quinacridone burnt orange and ultramarine blue (watercolor).
the page on the left has been gel medium-ed down and is ready for the next step. you get a lot of nice texture when you use the muslin to wipe extra paint off of pages (or your paint dish). it gets crinkly... i added the fleur de lis and letter stencils last. now i'll paint these pages with ivory acrylic (at least), and rub it off in places. what shows through informs what comes next...
on the way to the grocery store last week i read an article about how to make little books from canvas by folding and cutting. it's in the sept./oct. 2008 'cloth paper scissors' if you're interested... i immediately thought *muslin*, and came home and painted both sides of a 9" x 12" piece to make this.
the front cover so far... i think these have potential as small travel journals -- you could bind them together after you have a stack of them!
they're very simple to make...
just about every day i've done a painting in my little travel journal. i've loved working on these small pages, so maybe i won't make my next one bigger after all.
all of these were painted with watercolors, outside...
it's been good walking weather, so i've been out visiting trees... this beautiful being has been hollowed out by fire and is big enough for two people to sit inside.
every time i visit i prop up the pine cones, tin cans, and broken glass... i call it the green shrine...
and
i hang flags... this time i pinned this muslin onto a copper flag from a couple of months ago -- i keep checking for patina, but nope!
since i've been reading books by different artists lately, i'm going to end my posts for a while with words from them that have impressed me... charles reid continually impresses me...
"The biggest problem with finishing a painting is the wish to make it just a bit better, to add just a bit more. Here, I left a lot of white paper because I didn't know what to put in. If you don't know what to add, don't add anything. Leave some mystery."
(okay, i'm reminding myself of that next time, hee! )
XO
