Friday favourites
20 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
I haven’t done Friday favourites for a while. But I’ve just joined Pinterest (aaargh – that’s another six hours a day gone!), and as I was pinning some of my favourite works I came across a group of artists working with paper. As I’ve recently made paper myself, I thought this would be a good theme for today’s selection.
Polly Verity makes amazing origami curved folds, each scored and folded from one sheet, with no cuts and no glue. I also love her work made from crumpled tissue paper, like the liver, stomach, colon and small intestine:
Isaac Salazar is an accountant who has never taken an art class. He uses old books that would otherwise be thrown away and creates words and images by folding and cutting the pages:
Finally, Bekx Stephens creates geometric sculptural pieces that seem to create waves of movement through repetition. I would love to learn some of these techniques to use on fabric with printing/dyeing:
New term, new technique
12 Jan 2012 5 Comments
in paper Tags: Morley College, papermaking
It was back to Morley College on Tuesday, and time to learn about papermaking.
Over the Christmas holidays I’ve had a large bucket in my kitchen filled with shredded envelopes and water. To make strong paper you need long fibres, and every time paper is recycled the fibres get shorter. So it’s not a good idea to use paper that’s been recycled before if you want to make your own.
The longer the paper is soaked, the better, especially if it’s thicker, like brown paper. Apparently it can start to smell after a while, so you can add a couple of drops of bleach if this happens. However, mine didn’t smell at all, even after soaking for a week, though I did have a lid on my bucket.
To take the paper into college, I took a handful, squeezed it into a ball to get rid of the excess water, and put it in a plastic bag. Then it was off to Morley with a bag of soggy balls!
At college, we soaked the balls in hot water to loosen them, and then put a small handful in an ordinary liquidiser with a lot of water and blended for 15-20 seconds. We filled a deep tray – a (clean!) cat litter tray is ideal – with water and added some pulp. Then we agitated the mixture, dipped in a screen and lifted it up vertically so that a layer of pulp settled on the top.
We put this face down on a damp J-cloth on top of a damp blanket, and gently pressed with a sponge to mop up the excess water. After this we peeled off the screen carefully from one corner, and – voilà - a sheet of paper!
We then folded over the top half of the J-cloth so that the paper was completely enclosed, and put another J-cloth on top to make the next sheet. At the end, we squeezed out all the excess water using a Victorian screw press.
Because the paper is very fragile when wet, we had to take the J-cloths home and peg them out to dry before unpeeling them to reveal the finished paper. So we have to wait until next week to see how everyone’s samples turned out – very exciting!
But here is a sneak preview of some of my samples, with various inclusions such as yarn, paper, eggshells, muslin, and raffia.
The paper pulps were all different colours, depending on the mix of coloured paper and envelopes people had used. Mine was pale lilac; one of the other student’s looked like beetroot soup!
The finished paper looks very different when it is dry. When wet, it is much more translucent, so if you want to items that you have embedded to show when it is dry, it’s best to scrape off some of the pulp while it’s wet.
I think it will be really interesting stitching into some of these samples to add further texture, though I’m not sure how robust they are. More to come on this, I suspect!
Snowflakes and vanishing gold
16 Nov 2011 5 Comments
in paper, print Tags: bonding, gold, joss paper, paper, snowflakes
Last Sunday was part 2 of the course on bonding paper and cloth. Having learnt the basic technique, it was time to start experimenting.
The idea of a contrast between transparency and opacity made me think of ice and snow, which is sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque. So I photocopied some images of ice and snow crystals and spent a happy afternoon creating paper snowflakes (I felt as if I was six years old again!). Most of the snowflakes I tore rather than cut, because I wanted the outlines to be slightly fuzzy rather than sharp.
However, I was a bit disappointed with the result (below).
First, I think the snowflake templates moved slightly when I put the screen down – maybe this is one of the occupational hazards of printing with an open screen. Also, I tried to graduate the colour of the background from light to dark, but I think it would look better if the background was a consistent hue. Finally, the snowflakes that were cut rather than torn look better, because the process of removing excess paper leaves a slightly fuzzy edge anyway.
So I did another one with a background of more uniform hue, which I think looks better. There are fewer snowflakes because I ran out (of templates and time!) – but I can see the direction I want to develop this, maybe with some overprinting with opaque white ink and touches of silver foiling.
Bonded paper and fabric before removing paper
After removing paper
Just time, then, for another experiment with some joss paper, or ghost money, that I bought from a Chinese supermarket.
The paper is very thin, so I hoped it would disintegrate in the same way as newspaper. I also wanted to see what happened to the metallic gold squares during the process.
The result wasn’t quite what I expected. I laid out the paper face up, with the gold touching the fabric, but once the paper is bonded, it’s quite difficult to see the gold through the fabric (it’s more obvious close up if you shine a direct light on it). However, the metallic shine is much more obvious on the reverse.
Below, you can see the front and back of a small experimental sample as well as a larger piece using the joss paper.
Joss paper sample - front
Joss paper sample - back
Joss paper hanging
Close-up of front
Close-up of back
Hopefully I won’t now be struck down by malevolent Chinese spirits who feel insulted by my using the paper in this way!
Bonding fabric and paper
07 Nov 2011 3 Comments
in paper Tags: bonding, cloth, paper, printing, screens
I had a great day at Morley College yesterday learning a technique for bonding paper and cloth.
The technique is quite rough, so synthetic fabrics are better than delicate fabrics such as silk. The fabric also has to be as sheer as possible so that the paper can be seen clearly through it. And the paper has to be really low grade. Newspapers or colour photocopies are best – no glossy magazines.
We laid out a collage by cutting or tearing out bits of newspaper/colour photocopies, then pinned a piece of fabric over the top. Then we applied a matte medium through a silk screen. We didn’t prepare the screens ourselves but borrowed screens that were available in the studio.
Some screens were open – you can use paper templates or masking tape as an alternative to exposing the screen, or even paint the medium on using a brush (not sure how this works – I must ask next week).
After leaving the collage to dry thoroughly, we ironed it for 10 minutes to set the bonding thoroughly. Then we soaked it in water and rubbed off the excess paper. (This is why poor-grade paper is used, so that it disintegrates easily.)
Most people chose images for their collage, but I used a mixture of cuttings from Urdu, Hindi and Chinese publications, with occasional blocks of graphic colour, as you can see from the photos. It’s a difficult thing to photograph, owing to the mixture of transparent and opaque areas, so I’ve just shown some close-ups of various areas.
Some points to note:
- Images that are printed by an inkjet printer tend to run and stain the fabric, so colour photocopies are better than prints.
- The more sheer the fabric the better – you’ll be looking at the paper through the fabric (though I guess there’s no reason why you can’t show it from the back).
I also learned that you can use open screens with paper templates – far quicker than coating it, waiting for it to dry and exposing it, given the problems we’ve had with the facilities! Of course, you won’t be able to make multiple copies this way.
And you can use heat transfer papers, foiling or further printing with opaque ink on top, as well as other embellishment such as stitch. Hopefully we’ll get to try some of this next week.
Relief printing
31 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
in paper, print Tags: Chine collé, embossing, ink, lino, printing, woodblock
When I was on holiday in Rajasthan in India a few years ago, I visited some workshops where they printed fabrics with woodblocks. It was a fascinating process, so I thought I’d sign up for a two-day relief printing course at Morley College to learn the basics. The course synopsis said that we would learn about lino and woodblock printing on ink and paper, but I thought I might be able to learn enough to adapt the techniques to fabric.
D’oh! It turns out that relief printing usually results in a negative print – that is, if you cut away bits of the lino or woodblock in the pattern that you want and ink up the block, it’s the background that prints, leaving your pattern in the un-inked areas. To get a positive print, you’d have to cut away an awful lot of the block. Apparently, in Japanese woodblock prints, this is what happens to produce a key block. Not surprisingly, it takes a great deal of time and skill to produce such fine outlines, so it’s not something we tackled in our two-day course!
It takes a great deal of time and skill to produce a Japanese key block
So unless I want to use a lot of fabric paint, the lino and woodblock techniques I learned on the course are likely to be of little use for printing textiles. However, now I have a set of carving tools, there’s nothing to stop me carving simpler shapes on a woodblock and printing with that (like potato printing).
Anyway, I thought I might as well summarise some of the techniques we learned. Starting with lino, which is the easiest to cut, we used the reduction method to produce a three-colour print. So we first printed a yellow square using an uncut lino block (just lightly sanded with wet-and-dry paper).
First colour: uncut lino block in yellow
Then we cut away some of the block and inked it up in red before printing on top of the yellow.
Part of block cut away and inked in red over yellow
We completed the series by cutting more block away and printing in blue on top of the red and yellow. I didn’t get the registration quite right, so it’s a bit like looking at a 3D picture without the specs…
Three-colour lino print - slightly out of registration
Finally, we experimented with spreading a mixture of caustic soda and wallpaper paste onto parts of the block. This eats away at the lino, giving an interesting half-tone effect.
Caustic soda was added to the clouds and the edges of the sea
Another way to get a positive rather than negative image is to ink up with an opaque white ink and print on black or dark paper. The example below also uses the Chine collé technique, where you print on to a smaller, thinner sheet of paper sandwiched between the press and the main paper. The press helps bond the two papers together.
Chine collé lino cut tiger
We also had a go at embossing, using lino blocks. Here’s the same tiger lino cut as an embossed print.
Embossed lino cut tiger
All the prints above were produced using presses. For our final work, a woodblock print, we used a baren, or hand-held disc, to rub the surface of the paper against the block to transfer the ink. The wood absorbs a fair amount of ink, so you need to add more ink than on lino. And apparently the prints get darker after two or three presses.
Shall we dance?
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