Annie
I love how when you play and experiment without overthinking what you are creating that you can get some lovely unexpected results....but I also find this happens to me a lot when I am actually really trying :) and it goes "wrong", or when I am simply clearing out or rearranging my workspace I get inspired in unexpected ways.
The "rain" on the felt above happened by accident when my desk was too messy (as always I had gotten to the point where everything was out!) and I was too lazy to get paper towels to clean up as I worked. I wiped the wooden skewer clean that I was using to paint with on my brayer roller then realised that was a bad idea so I cleaned the brayer on a piece of felt in the pile. Immediately I thought - "ooh rain over a stormy sea!" Brilliant! I wonder whether if I had actually been trying to create rain whether I would have thought to put paint on a roller from a skewer?
I have recently begun a fabric printing evening class - hence the renewed interest in playing with paints! It's a basic introduction to making homemade stamps out of anything you can think of (more hoarding coming up!), lino cutting, silk screen with stencils and learning how to make repeating patterns etc. It's a lovely low-tech course using pen and paper rather than the computer. On my first session I picked up some pipe insulation to print circles (I love working with simple circles - there is something very pleasing to my eye about the circle) and I applied the fabric paint and started stamping out circles only to discover I hadn't cleaned the paint roller properly and there was still traces of yellow on it which mixed with the blue. The effect was lovely and one I will use again :)
For homework I carved a stamp from lino - the repeating cloud pattern below took me about 5 attempts to get right, but eventually it happened. I showed unusual persistence with this! However, I forgot about lining up the marks in the sky around the clouds and just gouged it out randomly. I was disappointed to start with then realised that I actually prefer that it is a bit mismatched as it shows the handmade-ness of it. I'd like to use this design (or something like it) to make a bedside lampshade one day, or more likely a pillow case.
I did some more experimenting with circles, this time on to some handmade felt. I found the scrim topping really helped the paint to sit more clearly rather than straight on to fibres. However, I thought I had mixed opaque paints but I had used the translucent binders in the mix, and also I'd not let it dry in between and the colours showed through and mixed. To great effect! Not what I had intended but nice all the same.
A great side effect of all the printing is that I found if I leave an open sketchbook next to me I can clean my tools off on to the pages (as well as any felt or fabric laying around) and I get some unplanned freely created backgrounds in my sketchbook which is always good to not have to start with a blank white page when you want to sketch something.
I discovered how effective randomness with a brayer roller can be when I was sketching at evening class using twigs etc as "pens" to encourage freedom of mark-making. My piece of paper ended up like this...
...with lots of really effective pieces in it. The "bumps" that fade as they go up the page are from paint blobs on the brayer and the the little square of heart shapes is from the end of my twig where it didn't sharpen properly.
Back at home clearing out my craft space (again! it gets soooo messy!) I found a pile of colour catcher sheets (the ones you put in the washing machine) in all lovely colours that I'd been saving. For something. I've no idea what. Time to be ruthless I thought... until I picked up the stack and bent them in half - could they be made into a little textiles sketchbook?!
Lastly (for now!), I'm always looking for new ways to make effective edges on small pieces of felt and I found this little sample in my pile. The piece of fabric must have been the edge of an old scarf or something and the frayed edge had stayed free of the wool fibres and made an interesting edge. Something to try to repeat in the future maybe on a small flowers picture or a wild landscape.
The trouble is that the more you play with stuff the more that this happens which leads to more ideas! I'm sure we've all got plenty of examples. If only spare time was like creativity and the more you used the more you got!
