Yeah, I worked some yesterday, but I took the next two days off, because Tuesday is my Mom's 90th birthday and I have things to bake and get ready for her big day AND I wanted a day to myself... which most times means playing in my art stuff. Therefore, I skipped my normal Sunday visit since I will spend most of Tuesday with her and lots of my other family. My brother is bringing in a huge spread of Mexican food from a restaurant he loves and anybody that wants some of it for lunch can show up. The rest of the day it can be leftovers from that (if there are any) and desserts and ice cream for anyone that stops by. Yum Yum, Fun Fun.
Now that's out of the way, I decided to try again for just a black and white practice project. This time, since i painted all the papers myself, I decided to only use papers without adding any additional paint. I mean, I already painted them, right ? I had taken some time a little while back and had a black and white paper making session. I wanted to share some of that, but I thought it would be nice if I just shared some of them while posting a practice piece.
I also left it abstract so no particular piece was meant to stand out by my decision, whatever stood out in the end would just be a happy accident.
Turns out, today was the day ! Below are some photo collages of some of the collage papers I made. It's not all of them, but this is pretty much overkill already. 😄
I made them with my gelli press that I showed you before, making some that looked like they were simply stenciled on and their reverses in the shape of the actual stencils.
It was a lot of fun and since I was only using black paint, I wasn't having to clean anything up between the different prints
I also printed some on coffee filters as I was trying to make some black and whites on different kinds of papers.
At the end of that printing session, I did add some color on a few trying to save some prints that came out totally unusable otherwise and in one photo you can see that I also did a black print or two some some yellow rice paper.
This photo collage also includes a photo of the gelli press and rollers and one photos was the blotting/stencil clean off paper that I used when getting excess ink off of some of the stencils.
I kind of love the photo collages. So easy to show so much more without 10 thousand photo entries. 😂
So back to today's black and white page I made in my practice journal. You probably didn't notice, but it skipped from J3 to J5.... because J4 didn't cooperate and I am giving it the silent treatment. I don't think it will ever get it's own post, but I expect to put one photo somewhere of it's crappy finish. LOL ! ha ha ... yes I said crappy.
Although I didn't expect you to store the above to your permanent memory, this photo below shows how I started. This whole thing is one of the painty / collage pieces that was shown above. I made it using several different stencils, the background was just a whole brick wall stencil and then once dried, I came back with bits and pieces from other stencils in white for a variety, believing I would tear it into pieces later when using.
In the end though, I really liked how it came out and decided to use the whole thing as my background.
Since it is all black and white, it may be a little hard to instantly see the changes from one photo to the other below, but I promise, there are new additions in each one. Another chance for you to play the "what is different about these two photos" game.
Some additions to the middle...and a 2.
I didn't just use black and white collage papers from the day the above photo collages are from. I also used some bits of black and white papers I had made along the way previous to that.
Some additions to the top and upper part of the body....
Some additions to the right and beside the 2.
Some additions to the bottom and left. I laid another piece or two of paper here and there to see if more wanted to go on, but decided this was enough.
Since the original collage paper was not as large as the whole journal page, I chose to make bits and pieces of the add-on papers flow over the edges instead of putting it all around for an even page. I liked it's uneven borders.
Then I caled it DONE !
It's only 4:30 pm here now, so I am going to find something to eat and head back to the art table to see what's next.
I hope you are all having a good day or evening, whatever it is where you are, when you are reading this.
