Quilt Experiment: Gesso & Paint

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After Gesso is added.

After Paint is added.

This fabric mixed media experiment was inspired by work I have seen on the blog Purple Missus and the work that Linda and Diana Kemshall  in their book The Painted Quilt.

I have tried a few 'quilt it then paint it' experiments but this is my first one using gesso after quilting. You can see I also added some beads and a little hand stitching before adding gesso and painting. This was really fun and is still a work in progress.

It has several layers of watered down acrylic (first layer after the gesso) as well as some different colors of Lumiere Russet, Copper and Gold. I did decide it was too metallic and added some Violet Jacquard Textile Color with a sponge brush, gently pulled across the top.

My favorite part of this are the my little circles that meander across this piece. I think they now look like stones in a river.

I am curious what you see and what you like about this experiment? Ever done anything similar?  More to come as I will be adding some satin stitching to the sides and maybe add some more beads and hand stitching.  More to come

Leave a comment and as always, you can click on photos for a closer look.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

Playing with Clay

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Working at an art studio gives me the chance to play around with a variety of mediums. One of my favorites is clay. I like the clay that is grey when unfired and turns white when fired.

One of my most recent works-in-progress is a kind of free-form bowl that I built from a slab of clay and textured with various items that were available to me that day.

I'm calling this my rose bowl, hee hee. I have been practicing making clay roses and get better each time I try. 

I love experimenting as often as I can. It keeps the creative juices and ideas flowing. Even though I am a novice, I know that experimenting and playing around with mediums will always lead to improvements and new ideas.

What mediums do you allow yourself to experiment with?

Experimenting w/ Golden Digital Grounds

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Golden Digital Grounds – Experiments

I will confess that I bought a sample pack of Golden’s Digital Grounds http://www.goldenpaints.com/mixmoremedia/digiground.php over a year ago and just never got around to experimenting with them. I bought the sample pack at Arizona Art Supply http://www.arizonaartsupply.com/ which contained 3 bottles of grounds and 2 jars of topcoats.

On a recent Friday night, in an exhausted state of being, I was entertaining myself by watching You Tube videos about printing on uncommon surfaces. Many of the videos I watched that night were by northern Arizona artist Kathyanne White http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oSPP0zUcv0&feature=related , whom I met this year at Art Unraveled. She uses a product called Inkaid http://www.inkaid1.com/ which I have never seen but seems to act like the Digital Grounds products in that it creates a surface on top of a surface so that it will hold the inks of an inket printer. She prints on lacepaper, fabric, etc.

Well, when she got to the part in one of her videos where she prints onto recycled aluminum cans, I was so inspired by then I pulled out my digital grounds and started playing. Here are my results:  Clck 'read more' for pics.....