Play Day

The day was nice, I was off work and I didn't feel sick, Yay! I have a lot more free time on my hands now as the kids Art class I teach in the afternoons is over for the term. What better way to spend the day than do some experimenting.

In the most recent issue of Quilting Arts magazine there is an article titled "Florabundance" by Jill A. Kennedy which takes you through her step by step process to creating her pieces. I was intrigued and unlike a lot of articles in similar magazines - I had the majority of materials on hand. I did things a little differently though the basic idea came from that article.


The first thing I did was take my box of crayons to a variety of papers, I took this opportunity to recycle some paper bags, a catalog cover, envelope , grocery list as well as some old construction paper. I put my doodling hands to work and scribbled away over my papers.



Detail of the lovely urban outfitters brown paper bag, scribbled all over. I really want to create a teal piece for a project that I have in mind - so I went with greens, blues and browns as my colour palate.



Next thing I did was paint a weak teal dye over all the papers, I did a couple of coats because some of the papers were not as absorbent as others.



At this stage (after they dried) I took the papers back inside and ironed them between sheets of parchment paper, the paper absorbed the wax and they became sheets of batiked paper.



I then took out my crayons again and waxed different doodles all over the top of the previous ones. I wasn't as careful with the colour of the crayons I chose at this point and I added some pinks and purples into the mix.



The papers then got a coat of brown dye over the top.



After they dried I scrumpled them all up. The orange is the inside of the Urban Outfitters paper bag.


Then I ironed them all out, making my room smell like wax and making me yearn for my wax pot and tjanting. Detail below, I am impressed with how this technique looks - I will probably chop up the pieces and rearrange them next so that the urban outfitters lettering isn't so obvious. My favourite pice of paper is the top left of the image below.