Pewter-grey ribbon choker

This is something I made for Elly, which she's quite pleased with. It's made from 10mm double-satin ribbon, fastened at the back with a tiny buckle, and the eyelets for the tongue are just punched through and edged with varnish for strength. (Mind you, I need to redo them, because this was a bit of an experiment and I've found a better method - acrylic paint then varnish) as a result.





Photos by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

Om be praised!

A friend asked me recently to do some concept artwork for the Church of Om, before a service to be given at the Discworld Convention - specifically, a vaguely Buddhist-style mandala. Here's the result.



Photo taken by Nick Metcalfe. All rights reserved.

Malachite & bronze

Another experiment - I picked up two new colours and a new gloss medium, and wanted to try them all out.

The background is Hooker's Green (System 3), and the metalwork is done using Ara Dark Bronze. This is gorgeous stuff, but it's a nasty one to clean up - I had to go back to one brush and wash it over again. The catalogue suggested that the Rheotech gloss medium would also work as a hard, permanent, waterproof glaze/varnish, so I decided to try that out too. It ends up as a relatively low gloss, but still brings out the colour of the background beautifully.



I need to work on getting a more even texture for the varnish, but it still works.

Gramarye

The design and text are screenprinted, the frame is screenprinted and then overpainted to give the broader deckle.

For this one, I made a screen framework from scrap mountboard and stapled the screen onto it. Note to self - do not attempt to block it out in the same colour as the sharpie you use to draw the text on.

I used another scrap of mountboard for a squeegee - oddly, it's remarkably difficult to find an actual squeegee around here. I'm sure I remember seeing them in all sorts of places, but when I'm actually looking for one...

The printing process went well, and it gave quite a lot fewer artifacts than the stencilling did. (Though, to be fair, that might also be down to taking more care over blocking it out.) One thing I did see was a set of blobs on the right-hand side, just outside the frame - that's the other reason I overpainted it, of course.

It's hard to make out with my crap photography, but there's an interesting 3D effect on the second half of the text - a grey drop shadow to the right. I'm not sure whether that's down to blocking or lifting or driving paint underneath, since I was standing on that side and spreading paint towards me.

T-shirt stencilling

I made this the other day - Sainsbury's sell fairtrade cotton T-shirts for £3 each. Still horribly ecologically damaging, but there aren't really any practical alternatives to wearing cotton. And cheap, so I picked up some to experiment with.


(I tweaked the brightness and contrast a little, to adjust for the domestic lighting and make the pattern more visible.)

Following a friend's suggestion, I made a screen from net curtain fabric (£1.50 a metre from Walthamstow market) and spread it taut on my tambour frame. Some viscous grey acrylic worked nicely to block it out, after drawing on the design with a Sharpie (note to UK people - you can get authentic Sharpies at Ryman's, and they are indeed as good as people say).

I mixed up the paint, using 1:1 acrylic paint and textile medium, but managed to overestimate and dish out far more than I actually needed. I ladled it out with the brush and vigorously rubbed it in (with the same brush - this makes it, technically, stencilling rather than screenprinting) going over and over in several patterns.

The first layer - the gold - went on nicely, but I didn't have complete coverage. Some areas of the disc were a bit patchy. I ended up taking the screen off and hand-painting over it, since it was such a large area and no fiddly bits to deal with, and deliberately doing texture effects. I'm not sure either way about the rough, frayed edges of the disc - I rationalise it by thinking of it as deckle.

After leaving that to dry for 24 hours or so, I put the second screen on (the first was a simple circle) and repeated the procedure with the blue. This time it didn't need overpainting except in a few small areas - I didn't want to risk putting the screen back down and ruining the registration.

I'm rather fond of the distressed print effects and broken lines, and I'll freely admit to being a sucker for this particular colour combination.

The houses of the sun

The biggest reason I paint is that I truly love working with good, vibrant colours. I had to get some more gold acrylic last week, and found some Daler-Rowney System 3 on offer. I've just opened it up, to do some gold detailing on a keyring piece (you know the things, those little snap-together plastic ones that you can put photos or anything in - I use them for scraps of my test pieces) and just had to do a couple of panels too. I don't know what I'll end up doing with them, but anything I paint over that with is going to be warm and luminous.

Gold & ultramarine

I'm normally reluctant to varnish things, but this seems to have worked out.



[Edited and recreated, because I accidentally overwrote it with the text of another post.]

Redemption of materials

Awhile ago, I got handed a couple of free notepads at a promotional event. A good size, and not bad paper - too glossy for sketching with most tools, and not thick enough to paint on normally, though, so they've been languishing on the shelf since.

And in my paint box I discovered a tube of the most horrendous pink acrylic I've ever seen. It's 'dusty rose', and whilst that name may conjure up horrors they're nothing to the reality. It's rather like salmon pink, but without any of the latter's implications of pleasantness, prettiness, restraint, attractiveness, or general good taste.

So of course I sloshed it on, whirled it around, let the paper soak it up, curl, and wrinkle, and then when it was dry I brushed metallic gold acrylic very thinly over it. The combination of the paint texture and the change in the paper surface with the curling and drying gave it an interesting tooth, especially with a very dry brush. I may well do more with it later, since I now have a piece of pretty paper, but I also have the habit of scanning intermediate stages in and saving them for background textures, so I thought I'd share this one with you all.