I started painting onto some Somerset paper (300 gsm) with Liquitex Heavy Body acrylic. I’m not using any preliminary drawings, I have a vague idea of what I want and I’m going to see what the paint and the brush do. This lovely blue is the first stage. I left the large sheets to dry on my rug, which is pretty spectacular and I really should use it in an artwork sometime.
What am I up to? I’m pushing right out of my comfort zone, that’s what! This is the beginning of something very new. I hope it works. I’ve mixed up some Liquitex Heavy Body acrylic paint – Titanium White with 2 Pthalo Blues – red hue and green hue. And I’m going to slap it onto some large pieces of gesso-ed Somerset paper (300 gsm).
I had a little bit left of the Bideford Black paint I made recently. It wasn’t a lot so I tried thinning it down with water and took a fairly wide, flat brush to make stripes across one of the sheets of paper I’d prepared with gesso and walnut ink. The Bideford Black wash broke up on the surface of the paper in a very pleasing way. I tipped the paper to get the dribbles running across it.
I used the Bideford Black paint I made yesterday. I didn’t have any idea what to do. I’m trying to get away from always working representationally and letting my imagination take over. It’s way out of my comfort zone! I took a fairly wide, flat brush and made swirls over one of the sheets of paper I’d prepared with gesso and walnut ink. It’s a surrealist way of working and I don’t know where it’s going to take me, but I’m not going to worry about it.
After coating some sheets of paper with my home-made walnut ink yesterday, I decided to stay with natural pigments and make paint with some lumps of Bideford Black I’ve had lurking in a box for years. I’d made paint with it before, using water (here). This time I mixed it with Nori paste and vodka. It was much thicker than the previous water-based one. I’m going to use it on top of the walnut ink paper.
I prepped some paper yesterday with gesso and my home-made walnut ink. I have to be careful with the ink as I am allergic to walnuts, proper anaphylactic stuff, so plastic gloves, mask and lots of ventilation are needed when I’m spreading it onto the paper. It seems ok to work with when it’s dry though. It’s quite smelly because it contains 20% surgical spirits (rubbing alcohol) to preserve it as it’s organic and grows mould without the alcohol.
The ink is made from the husks, the fruit around the actual walnut and gives a beautiful, colour-fast sepia ink. You can read how to make walnut husk ink here in one of my previous blog posts.
This blog has always been about my art practice but I don’t often post about the tools I use. And of course these underpin everything I do. Here’s a selection of brushes, some for watercolours and inks, some for acrylic paint. I don’t use oil paints. The toothbrush is for splatter and the feather – well I don’t know. It looks good in the pot 😀
Just a quick little scribble in a cafe, took about a minute with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen into my tiny leather-bound sketchbook.
It’s #StandingStoneSunday and here’s one I did earlier lol 😀 It’s a stone that lives in a small community on the North-East fringe of Swansea, in Bonymaen. The Welsh name of the area means the “base of the stone” and there’s a legend that it’s one end of a vast stone that travels under the city and pops up again in the Gower village of Penmaen, which means “head of the stone”. Although there isn’t a standing stone in Penmaen, there are some ancient stone monuments.
It’s #Caturday Saturday and here’s a blast from the past. Sparta Puss from 10 years ago, drawn in pen into a small sketchbook. She’s sitting on an old glass-fronted cabinet that Husb and I rescued from the street. There’s a cyanotype I did of Husb on her left.
