Days Three & Four wiped.me.out! I had a nice dinner with new friends last night, so a bit of catch up writing today. On Wednesday morning, everyone was given a prompt from Pat, a challenge that was tailored to each person to work outside of their comfort zone. Mine was to make a large repeated motif that filled my silk screen. Fortunately, that worked quite well with what I had planned for using BioArt as inspiration as well! We learned a variety of ways to resist dye on the screen using soy wax, which is stable until you easily melt it off with hot tap water, torn paper, thin stencils, or any other manner to block the dye from permeating the screen. I mostly used the wax.
I made this big doughnut shape that repeated in different colors and values, cascading from a corner. Most of my samples this week use a dense cotton customary for art quilts, but for this, simply to learn how it might go, I used a very thin cotton/linen gauze. The silk screen worked very well, but dropping in a background with the scraper was tricky. We'll see how it rinses out Friday. I suspect it will be very faint just because there isn't a lot of fabric in the loose weave for the dye to grab onto. I also used the same screen to make the first of many steps in a version of "arterial dreams." (described in the Day 2 post)
Using Portrait of An Athlete as an inspiration, (copyright, BioArtography, Jon Gumucio, Undergraduate Student, Department of Kinesiology) I planned a multi-step process to scale up the cells. On Tuesday, just before leaving, I scraped in a pink and red background so it could dry overnight. Then, using the lino block I made a few weeks ago, I rolled on some soft broken texture using a mixed black dye. While not a clean, crisp motif, my hope is that it will "play well" with the larger scaled shapes applied on top. My intention had then been to create a screen print to blacken the negative spaces between the pink connectors in the research, but I thought it was too big a leap in scale from the lino print. So, I used a commercial stencil that quoted the broken line texture first (and in the end, last as well), before waxing the silk screen with the broken cell shapes.
Not everything I'm dyeing is using the BioArt as a source of inspiration; some it just art making. Many of the participants are art-quilt makers, using or making their own one-of-a-kind fabrics to make stunning, unique wall hangings. There are a lot of conversations about how to cut into finished pieces. Frankly, I have no idea how I might use some of these fabrics as the main goal has been to practice technique. After doing so much digital work lately, it's been nice to do some translucent color mixing.
This example is a current favorite. Again, at the end of the day Tuesday, I laid in a dark blue black background texture so it had time to dry. I placed a variety of grid textures under the fabric- place mats, sink mats, fencing, shelf liner, etc...then lightly and dryly rolled over it with a small foam roller. Wednesday, using leftover green and yellow dye, and using everyone's favorite stencil, I blocked in chunks of pattern.
Then, today, I mixed this amazing purple which really made the first texture pop and muted the green stencil. I added a lot of print paste to the purple to create the pink. All of the edges are achieved using the sharp straight edge of the scraper. The last bit was to scrape in an under-mixed golden yellow. I'm very curious to see how this one rinses out. All the fabric this week was prepped with a soda ash soak- those are the ashy bits, plus there's excess print paste adding a shine, both of which will wash out. Fingers crossed!
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