Sorry to be so quiet; my god daughter and her mother have been visiting for a few days. In the meantime, I hope you've kept up with the additional comments on the quotations in the last three posts. They've been interesting and thought provoking and I'm still taking it all in.
In the meantime, my goddaughter and I carved out a few hours to "throw some paint around." We used Pebeo Setacolor paints and did a little sun printing. I mixed up a blue, a green and a red, and using foam brushes, we took turns adding paint marks to white muslin. She made off with the piece that was taped to this silvery crepe wrapping paper I'd saved from a Christmas package before I could get a picture of it. I started by painting an arc in my color and she echoed it in hers. This was an amazingly meditative process as we slowly took our turns filling the cloth. Then we tossed on some elbow macaroni for the sun printing. Her mother said it looked like maggots and that's all it took for the god daughter to choose it to take home!
This was the first one we did, and yes, I know some people think the sun printed ferns have been done to death, have become cliche. But I've never used them before and wanted to give it a go. We'd picked the ferns while on our walk along the bike trail that morning. In spite of putting them in water, they dried and curled rather fast, leaving faint impressions. 
The painting process on this one was more hurried, less deliberate, just random filling in - me with the green, she with the blue. I sprinkled coarse sea salt on as well which you can see the effect of in this closeup. This one was my favorite, the one I thought came out the best.
The last one was just painting bands and blocks of paint, using up what we had left. Blah. I went back and touched the end of the foam brush here and there which makes the circles of dark color; my god daughter followed suit. Then I scattered rice and sea salt.
I also showed her how to use the waste water from rinsing the brushes to tint fabric. The one piece I did this way turned out a beautiful pale orchid. Yum. I saved the rinse water so I can tint more with this.
It's been a long time since I've had a "playmate" to join me in stuff like this. I was hoping she'd find this fun (her mother confirmed my observations that indeed she did enjoy it), but I hadn't anticipated just how much I'd enjoy it too.
1 comment:
Sunprinting with ferns was new for me as of Sunday...lol...didn't know it had been done to death - I thought I was being quite imaginative... Oh well!! :)
When I gathered mine I took several pieces of cardboard (about the size of sheets of paper) and kept them flat as I gathered. I was pretty impressed with the way they came out. I pressed the ferns into the wet fabric/paint and smoothed them out as I laid them on. We had some wind pick up and sun was in & out but the ferns I pressed into the fabric with my fingertips had the longest chance to make an impression.
I would do it again...with ferns, too!!
Post a Comment