Pocket Shots

 I don't know how much this happens to other people, but I occasionally put my phone back in my pocket 'open' and somehow the movement or an external pressure takes a photo - of the inside of my pocket.  At least I am not pocket-dialling folk I guess.

Whilst we were on Orkney a month or so ago I got this remarkable sequence of colour variations. I was taking a lot of photos it seems and putting my phone in and out of my pocket a fair deal.

And just this week, these two occurred.

I have no idea where these two come from, or what I was doing/wearing at the time, but they give me a bit of a smile and make me think how sometimes random art is the best kind of art.

Colour theory is not my strength

 As I began to work my way through my thoughts of The Shape of Things III, I once again knew I wanted to colour the paper somehow.

I had in mind shades of indigo or maybe shades of navy blue. I had in my head that I had some indigo powder - that if I added water to it, would create for me the shade of deep dark blue I was hoping for. So a little while ago I went in search.

Excited that I found it! 

It looked appropriately dark and mysterious and I set about starting with the tiniest of doses.

I added a bit more and it went this colour. Not exactly dark and mysterious now!

Sigh. It looks more sky blue to me than indigo, and is seriously not going to be an answer of any sort, no matter how hard I try to re-frame the question.

So back to my inks and paints I went, testing this and that and getting nothing that matched the mood I was going for.

And this is where I landed - with a hotch potch of maybes and some very random notes about how to maybe create indigo from other colours.

I have no understanding of what goes with what to make what and so took the opportunity of asking my three super talented friends Susan, Steph and Tory how they would go about making indigo, when we had lunch a week or so ago.

Of course they all knew exactly what to do and look at the difference that made! My lower swatches are so much better than my upper swatches - glee I say!

Steph suggested I buy Indigo - great move. And Susan and Tory both suggested alizarin crimson, prussian blue, violet and lamp black.  So I bought Indigo and mixed it with a bit of the crimson and a bit of the blue and feel like I got where I wanted to go.

And I loved the wavy marks left on the butcher's paper after I lifted up the sheets I had painted with my new found indigo watercolour mix.

So pleased I can colour my pages just the way I imagined...

Experimenting

Thanks to a helpful reader, I have chosen to not use the word 'play' in reference to time spent trying this and that in the studio, rather I am now scheduling Experimental Time. It seems I am truly a person who need to give themselves permission to play by doing something that appears purposeful.  

Although interestingly, the play has all been purposeful - with something potentially far-fetched and a fair way off in the future, I wanted to experiment with options; so purposeful play, or educational experimenting it is!

I have been quietly working away trying to learn about ways to write poetry, and I have really enjoyed that time exploring.  I have decided I want to try and write one of the poems to use in this future work; but I want it to be 'hidden'. So I decided to experiment with different tools, paper, techniques and styles.

I recently bought this pen - a masking fluid pen; and set to work writing on BFK Rives and Arches Velin printmaking papers. 

I used a style of lettering  first used back in 2015 for this momentous book.

I then did a watercolour wash over it and waited for it to dry.

And then tried to rub it off! Oh my goodness, horrid disaster. I wasn't sure if it was the pen, the application of it not enough, or the paper.  

I went with the paper and tried another version on cheap watercolour paper and ta da - it rubbed off beautifully!

I began to get the look I was hoping for...

Using a syringe to write (just like the lettering in Endure above),  I did a trial with a similar lettering style; and a cursive handwriting style - done very quickly with the aim of being somewhat indecipherable.

The syringe makes it hard to control; and creates some lovely pooling as well as some great mini splatter marks.

I went on and masked off part of the page; and ran a grey watercolour wash over the top. And I quite liked the effect. The shapes were just random shapes I had around; the future work would be quite a deal subtler I hope.

And then I played with filling in counters and negative spaces with bright, jewel-like watercolours.

Delicious and stunning and it made me very happy. Again the future work would be more subdued but something is beginning to look like it could work.

Experimental Time got a big tick from me this week.

Palettes of grey and blue

We often say there is plenty of weather here.  It moves and shifts and plays with you really.  This morning we woke to blazing sunshine and stillness after driving home in the gloom and mist and rain last night.

But it does wonderful things with the light, and looking back over photos, there are some lovely greys and blues...

Grey mornings, and the fish net drying poles

A sea wall at Keiss.

Peeling paint on a beached boat at Keiss.

Fishing nets in the beached boat at Keiss.

A transitional sky.

Clouds in a puddle

Clouds in the sky

The fishing net drying poles in the blue.

Teaching in Toowoomba

I had a wonderful weekend teaching in Toowoomba.  The Book Arts group invited me to teach "Words and more Words" as well as "Black Beauty"

Words and more Words is about helping folk who aren't calligraphers, and who don't have access to letterpress studio for example, include text and words in their work.  Often important for people making books.

So we started with a loosening up lettering using bamboo skewers and making letters connect to the previous one and to the 'line' above.

When Noreen finished her larger piece, she did a smaller piece and then dropped it on top of the larger piece - and we both loved the happy accident that the diagonal created.

We also did small tiny text tightly together - creating texture and and shapes by increasing the pen size or the line size; and by masking off areas and writing into shapes. All good fun and some great results!

I won't try and attribute all the work for fear of getting it wrong - but I think this is Jenny's.

 And I am pretty sure this is Margaret's.

The show and tell table at the end of the day - piercing and stitching handwriting and the occasional stamp and shim as well.

Day 2 saw us tackling the beauty of black and the good sense of a sampler book.
I just liked the skewers I used to stir up my metallic inks!

 Using metallic gel pens - I was fascinated by how solid the silver was; and how pale the black was!  An excellent example of why you would do a smaller book - even within a set of pens individual ones behave quite differently.

A discovery for most was how good graphite pencil (lead pencils) work on black and the interestingly different effects you can achieve.  The hard Hs leave such strong single lines; the softer Bs give a sheen and great coverage.

and Lorna loved this moment when she wrote straight from the tube of acrylic paint!

Margaret created beautiful examples as well as her swatches.

I loved these washes of the Caran d'Ache neocolors water soluble crayons...

We do a variation on the Japanese stab binding and I loved how Jean (top) varied my variation - I think I'll do that one too in the future!

Some of the sample books at the end of the day.

We worked hard and everybody was a bit tired at the end of two days - but we covered a lot of ground and folk have lots of ideas of what they can do next...

Thanks to everyone for such a great workshop - I always enjoy my time in Toowoomba!

PS if you'd like the chance to win a 'pockets are political' poster - pop on over here and leave a comment....