Project1 Making Marks: Stage 2 - Exercise 4 - Combing, Collaging, Rubbing and Resisting

This was the result of my first days worth of experimenting with exercise 4. 

As with the previous exercise, I had some preconceived ideas about the techniques that I liked or didn't as the case may be, but most of them did turn out to be quite pleasing to me.

There was one notable exception, I think I just don't get rubbing!  I remember really disliking it when I was at primary school, because nothing ever turned out as clean as I wanted it to and a quarter of a century later I still really dislike it.  I tried various surfaces - table mat, brick wall, carpet, pinecone, bike tyre and the seat of an old kitchen chair- but I just became frustrated by it.  So I shall speak no more of it!

I really enjoyed working on this technique.  I've been reading A Complete Guide To Creative Embroidery and it had an awesome section on manipulating paper that really inspired me.  I'd like a chance to explore the possibilities a bit further in the future.

I went and raided my children's make-and do box in the middle of the night and secretly stole away their crayons so that I could make some resists!  I did give them back when I was finished though:) I really enjoyed them while i had them though.  I also worked some layered resists with crayons and oil pastels and then scraped through the levels to reveal what was underneath.  I spent quite a bit of time using blue and orange together after I saw this painting by Picasso

This looks slightly purple but the book that I have shows it as being bright, vivid blue next to a dirt burnt orange and I loved the combination straight away so quite a lot of my experiments have been based around these colours.

I did quite a bit of combing and scraping through wet gouache because I really liked the impasto effect once the thick paint had dried.  This particular example was made using toe separator, which I also used to do some block printing , but I also tried out a fine tooth comb, a homemade cardboard comb and a cuticle stick.

I liked the effect that I could achieve from crumpling the paper repeatedly and then using oil pastel and water colour ink on it.  I especially like the effect used on thick brown envelope paper, I read about the technique in Drawn To Stitch but I was still amazed by how fabric-like paper can become when treated in this way.

I can definitely see many possibilities in using these techniques and I would like to be able to put some time aside to experiment with them a bit more.