Creative play

The housework can wait ... the past two days the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it.  I decided to pull out all stops and have a creative play day,or two - taking over every conceivable surface in my kitchen and experimenting with paints, inks, stencils and whatever that I'd collected over the years and never put to much use.  I have to admit to not having a clue what I'm doing, but I guess thats why its called "experimental" work.  The first thing I did was stencil some gesso over a piece of pelmet vilene, then spray it with washes and sprinkle some powder over it.  It took ages to dry and didn't end up as raised as I'd liked, but thats probably due to using gesso instead of molding paste.  I just can't find the Golden molding paste here in Oz.

You can see here that I had a few things on the go.  Working from the far right I painted some vliesofix; stamped a predyed piece of fabric; made labels for my C&G notebooks; and tried an experimental piece.

The experimental piece has a bit of everything thrown at it ... I mainly wanted to use my paper casts, so I attached them to the vilene with gesso, slapped a bit more gesso around, then thought "why not some more gesso" so put some through a stencil of square blocks.  Stood back and thought, hmmmm, too much gesso, so pressed some scrim into it, then sprayed dye-na-flow over it.  It all went too turquoise, so I had to knock back a few places and bring back the white of the gesso.  Then waited, waited, and waited some more for it to dry - blasted it with the hairdryer, waited some more, then went to bed and woke this morning to find it had finally dried!!  Now just have to decide where to go with it from here ... I know there's more to do to it, but I have to have a think about it, over a cuppa tea maybe.

It'd actually all started with me making the paper casts, and wanting to do something to finish them off.  This was a cast I made using cheap loo paper.  It worked wonderfully when I was making the pulp with just the paper and water, but when it dried it didn't hold together very well (found out later after some research, that I should've used watered down PVA glue at the time of pulping and molding) - so - I lathered it with textile medium to bind it together, which seemed to work, and then painted it with acrylic paint and rubbed metallic wax over it.  It's very subtle and doesn't exactly hit you in the face - but this might work in its own way.

I stencilled another piece of pelmet vilene with acrylic paints in periwinkle blue and silver.  I like this, but again, need to have a think of where to go from here.

Even the paper towels I used to mop up and wipe down came in handy as pieces of mini art.  I liked the colours down the middle of this piece of towel, so I used up the left over dye-na-flow to cover it then found I probably like this best of all - Murphy's Law huh!?  When you're not even trying, is when you get the best results.

So after two days of play, it's back to housework for a few hours ...  then some afternoon down time to get the creative juices flowing again and decide what to do with them from here.