Avacado dye and a sneak PULP peek!

I am excited to get my Labyrinth book back even though it was bitter sweet! It's not quite over for us Girla's but I am already looking forward to the day when the  chance to collaborate like this again comes my way! One of the things that bothered me most about my book wasn't that it might get lost in the post, it was actually the quality of my own work. Or, the poor quality! I don't think anyone else felt this way about it but it didn't take long before I did. When I sent my book off it was the best I had to offer. I was pleased with it. That said, I grew so much and so quickly from the exchange. Very quickly I knew I could do better than what I'd sent so I couldn't wait to re-do some of my own work. Above is a peek of a nights work. Here is what I made disappear. I am happy now.

These are the MOST AMAZING shades of grey I've ever seen. True story! The reason they excite me so much is because I made this dye from good ol' avos. Yes, avacados!

I didn't even know you could make avacado dye until I came across it on another blog and as luck would have it I had 2 avo's in the kitchen and no-one to eat them.

This was the darkest shade of grey I could achieve before my paper developed serious tension issues. I had to dye both side of the paper in the end, iron it and then flatten under books! Isn't it beautiful though?

If these look a little familiar to you it's because I've played with similar patterns before. They were indian ink and home made walnut dye. This time both my colours are home made dyes so for me that's a double happy! Amiria featured my background papers on her blog a while ago now. Check out the great selection of styles and  artist's here.

These ones really appeal to the wanna be graffiti artist in me! Some of them have a touch of walnut dye as well. With the last of my dye (2 avacados gave me enough to play with) I threw in some wet fabric scraps just to see what would happen. I like what happened!

Strangley enough, when I made this dye I expected to get pink not grey. As usualy I through bits of different methods together to make do with I had. It's ok though, I don't actually like pink!

Graffiti pages...finally!

I am really pleased with the way this series turned out! It didn't quite go to plan, I missed a deadline for the first time ever and I only created 8 instead of the intended 11. Once the deadline had passed there didn't seem to be a lot of point in creating the projects required 11 but I really wanted to see the project through. I see this series as a bit of a turning point in my artistic journey and even though the series is complete the journey  isn't. It's exciting to have a new path to explore and I will be taking inspiration from these pages and the Rena disaster for my next ICE series.

There are a lot of photos to follow so I am going to do it in two parts.

Part 1

Page 1.

Personally, I'm not actually a huge fan of this page! It showed enough potential though for me to keep working on it and as you will see from the other photos posted they contain similar elements but the style is cleaner.

Page 2.

Jackpot!  Home-made walnut and eucyalyptus dyes, pencil, map pieces and stitching. I love the bigger blocks of paper and most of the pages that followed adopted that look.

Page 3

The first page with an anatomically incorrect heart-nest! (Linocut)

Page 4

Page 5

The stitched text piece is my favorite part on this page, along with the note paper my kids used and left laying about.

It took me so long to 'get around' to finishing the series. Emotionally and physically I was really zapped by the effect of my daughters surgery and my mojo left me. It wasn't really a time thing, I had plenty of time sitting around in the ward and it seems logical to take my supplies and to pass time that way. Unfortuantely my logic and my motivation wern't in tune with each other! When I decided to detox one of the first things I did was to sit down and stitch and it only took a short while to finish these.

School goes back tomorrow for us, I have 2 at home full time doing correspondence and I hope that this term I will do better at balancing school and art. I really struggle with it and even now as I type I am aware that I should be planning the first weeks work instead.

On that note...see you soon:)

Nature Dyes

I'm loving this! It reminds me of leaf spots in Autumn.

It's the result of indian ink being dripped onto wet paper to cause a reaction, the paper was dried and then over-dyed with a wash of walnut dye. The pic below shows my son making one of his indian ink/water papers which we did  a few weeks ago. I saw the potential for good collage fodder so made myself a few too!  He graciously donated me his papers as well:)

My walnut dye. It's pretty dark so I was surprised it gave such an rust/orange shade to my paper. I made it by mixing and matching recipes I found on the net but the basic brew went like this...

Soak green walnuts in water in a stainless steel bowl 

(Until they ferment/smell bad and your family threaten to throw it out if you don't do something with it!! lol)

Boil the brew 20mins and then add 1 part white vinegar to help prevent mold.

So far this method worked but I think I should have boiled them longer to get the darker shade of brown I thought I was making! The dye is now in a jar out of direct sunlight, I will be interested to see if ageing it makes any difference to the dye colour. No doubt I could water it down to get a lighter shade of rust if I wanted too.

These too pics are the resulting papers from my Eucalyptus dye experiments. I like the shade of brown I got with  these.I added my own designs to the paper as you can see! Most of the "line" paper has already been used in my collage work so I will have to get another brew boiling! Good thing I collected a lot of bark!

ICE #12 is nearly finished. It was inspired by a game of snakes and ladders and uses a large piece of my lined eucalyptus paper so watch this space!