Saturday, March 07, 2020

Before and After Shots

Still Winter . . .
I've been struggling a bit with a cross between cabin fever and spring fever. February was just cold for the most part. When the sun did come out it was still cold and often windy. When it wasn't sunny it was often rainy. Now I'm not one of those who starts whining in February about how long the winter has been because I know darn well that in this part of the country, winter isn't over until April, and sometimes not even then. But since our snow has been sporadic and all that's left are some dirty piles pushed up by the plows, and nothing is budding out or even pushing up yet, my walks along my usual route have been bleak and soul-sucking. So when the sun did come out a few weeks ago, I headed to city beach for a different view that I hoped would perk me up. Even colder there with the breeze off the lake, but at least I was looking at something different, and I was a little surprised at how many people were there doing the same.


I do get some delight when the sun comes out from my collection of rocks that sit on a ledge below my house number. I don't think you can tell from the picture, but many of these have flecks of mica in them that make them pick up the sunlight in sparkles. Most of these have been snatched up on my walks because of an interesting shape, lines of different kinds of rock within a stone or a pleasing color. Since I live in a development where all of the townhouses are identical, This pile of rocks helps visitors delineate mine from the rest.

Before

And now the before and after promised in the heading. I continue to carry out small experiments in my 4-needle coptic binding book. You may remember me showing a spread where I painted brown ink over the paper. I decided to try a technique from the Sketchbook Revival Series, but pared down to this. Labels were suggested as an easy thing to use as a resist or to be left in place when flooding a page with inks. I remembered having some large labels bought for shipping, not realizing they were removable, more made for labeling a bin for instance. Maybe I can cut some tree shapes and apply them to the page, add diluted black ink I'd saved over and around them, and then remove them once the page was dry. It should leave me with brown trees on a darker background.

After

And it did! The black ink pooled at the edges of the label trees, defining them nicely.

Before

But because of my thing for birches, I wanted to try the same thing starting with a white page. I decided to set it up facing the somewhat failed experiment of dropping ink onto a wet page and use the same green ink.

After

This time I had some seepage under the edges of the label trees, probably because of them being used already. But I still like it.

Waste not, want not

By now the label trees were nicely colored from the two inks I'd used and still had quite a bit of stick to them. I couldn't bear to throw them out, so I found a page with a very faint string-pull image and place them there. I may need to add a little glue stick to the ends, but for now, they have a happy place to live.

All these pages have the potential to be worked into more, or may stay just as they are.

1 comment:

The Inside Stori said...

Yup, nature can sure be inspiring!