Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Design Wall

While plans for the new house are filling my days and my thoughts, the design wall seems to be coalescing into its own little art gallery with a definite color theme!




But this is the piece I'm writing about today...




This one is fun, so I'd like to talk a little bit about how I created it.


The base of the piece (blue) is 140# water color paper that was initially printed with deconstructed screen printing and fiber reactive dyes- the dyes normally used for fabric dyeing. In order to force the dye to bond with the fibers in the paper, I soaked the the paper in a mixture of soda ash and water. Watercolor paper should really be soaked thoroughly before being used, anyway, so the paper took to this process very well.


After the DSP was batched and rinsed from the paper (gently!), I soaked a piece of cotton in some teal Dye-Na-Flow and draped it over the paper. I let that dry, peeled away the (very cool) fabric, and ironed, ironed, ironed them to make sure the pigments were set.


The paper created the base for the next layer (orange): a block of cut SJ carved with an X-acto knife very, very carefully from a piece of Lokta paper I'd previously painted with acrylics.



(detail of cut Stacked Journaling- 
sorry about the poor color correction!)

I mounted the very delicate, lace-like cut paper to the water color paper base with a generous amount of matte medium. 

The piece measures about 18" x 24".

Happy creating!

5 comments:

BoholstWife said...

love the wall and neat-0 on the creation of such fabulous art.

Kathleen Loomis said...

Judi -- when you use dye on paper, how much do you have to rinse it out? I wonder about the soda ash and whether that would eventually eat at the paper.

Unknown said...

This is an interesting piece. I love the colors and the lacy look of the top piece. Thanks for sharing your method of getting the dye to bond to the paper. I have only dyed paper towels that bleed when you glue them to something else, but it did give me a cool effect anyway.

Fibra Artysta said...

Very beautiful! I love how delicate the stacked journaling cut out is. Like a shadow...

laura west kong said...

I love your design wall gallery! Thanks for sharing your creation process!