Tuesday, February 2, 2010

No. 4 & A New Batch

This week I kept the Citrasolv/NatGeo collage simple and used only contrast to tell my story.

 
CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"

Because I don't want to use up all my WonderUnder on this series, to adhere this collage to its masonite substrate, I coated both the surface of the masonite and the backs of the papers I wanted to use with gloss medium. After they dried, I was then able to use my hot iron to collage the pieces down. 

I hit it with one coat of satin finish varnish to seal it. 

 
CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"
I've been going through a lot of papers to make this series and I still have six or seven re-purposed masonite pieces left to collage, so today, I melted another magazine. 
  
  
  
 

With this batch of papers, I learned from a couple of my previous mistakes and some slight adjustments yielded spectacular results. Last time, I got a lot of pages that were mostly black, and a lot more that all looked very similar to one another.

This time, I was more discriminating in picking my magazine- I sought one with a lot of brightly-colored photos, rather than one with darker photos and pages. Those dark, rich photos may look luscious in the magazine, but once the ink in them melts, they can become very black and indistinct.

The second thing I did, which took only a couple of minutes and, I think, made the biggest difference in my results this time as compared with the last, was that I went through the magazine first, page by page, and removed all the pages that had a lot of text and/or black areas. This helped to keep too much black ink from permeating every page in the melting process, and kept my colors bright and strong, and the patterning on each sheet sharp and clear.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love these new papers! You are really becoming quite the citra-art expert! Great Job!

elle said...

Judi! These are absolutely wonderful. You are having way too much fun! Now I really have to go back and reread about this citrasolve. 8^)

Robbie said...

Judi, these really did turn out quite interesting didn't they! Nice work (as usual!)

studio pashnada said...

these are so beautiful
now I have to add CitrSolv to my to-buy & to-do lists!
and these lessons will save me a lot of trouble - thank you so much

Michele/TextileTraveler said...

Really lovely. Thanks for the hints on the magazines--I'm still looking for the CitraSolv, but I'm determined to try this technique soon1

Anonymous said...

gosh I can't wait to try this. Your new collage is simple but it's very effective.

Nina Lise@Mrs Moen said...

CS No. 4 is stunning! So much texture and dept and with amazingly bright spots of colours hiding in the grey. It's the perfect picture of life.

Jan said...

Yeah Judi, you are really making this technique your own! Today I tried some stuff I had on hand in case it worked like the citrasolve. I only put a dab on a couple of pages and nothing at all happened so I will have to locate some citrasolve in order to try this. Your work is very inspiring!

Terry Jarrard-Dimond said...

Very nice! I haven't read all your process notes but the results are lovely.