Speaking of summer holidays, tomorrow is the last day of term. Morning as usual then an afternoon in church (It's a faith school) then I'm free!! Very excited!
Anyway, as you can probably tell I have been quite busy with work lately, so the art has been a bit slow lately, so thought I would add a few more photos of some things I have made since the beginning of the year:
Got to love a beautiful nautilus. I have a fossilised one, and I love it's shape. I also love the history of such an ancient creature that hasn't needed to evolve for millions of years. Already perfected maybe? I think they look pretty amazing. So, this was done on canvas with acrylic. As you can probably tell by now, I love bright bold colours...I quite liked this finished product.
A few more beach huts painted on driftwood there, that time I decided to keep it really basic just by using Posca pens. It was quite fun, I'd not used paint pens before and while the colours didn't come out quite so bright as if I'd used acrylic I still liked the overall finish.
Another little bit of gyotaku, this was mainly for practise of what to do when I mount it. The problem I discovered with gyotaku was due to the water based Japanese ink going onto thin rice paper, when it dried it caused the paper to wrinkle around it. I wasn't satisfied with a wrinkled paper in the final framing process, so I had to work on a way to get rid of it.
I prefer the idea of using natural products, so I had a go making my own wheat paste (1 part plain flour to 4 parts water boiled on the stove and stirred constantly until it thickens up) The paste itself came out great, smooth and easy to apply. The problem I then discovered was the paste soaked through to the ink and made it bleed. The finish would have been fantastic if it wasn't for that.
So it was on to phase two - I sourced some silicone paper (it's very expensive- and sort of like giant double sided sticky tape) but I managed to find some on a relatively small roll, but it meant I had to rub it incredibly firmly with the back of a spoon to take the layers off, and the final result was pretty rubbish. The rice paper didn't spread out as much as I wanted and left very permanent wrinkles. Not good!
So, phase three - this was having a go with some spray adhesive. We happened to have some lying around in the garage, but this was also a disaster, came out in blobs that weren't able to be spread onto the back of the rice paper. So...
Phase four...Prit-stick. Yep...just a normal glue stick! Why not? And surprisingly, it worked very well! Moist enough to spread onto the back of the rice paper and spread out the wrinkles, and thankfully not wet enough to make it bleed that much. I was actually pretty happy with this process. Although, I kind of thought it wouldn't be ideal for larger fish prints. So, I moved on...
Phase five...I bought some different spray mount. There's loads of different kinds, all claiming to do different things. I thought one that comes out like a mist may be effective, and as of yet, I haven't actually had time to test it out. So it may work, it may not! We shall see...probably going to give it a try when I come back from my holiday...fingers crossed by that point I will also have a few new fish prints to mount, hopefully ones I have caught on Islay.
So...many problems with gyotaku, especially on a very limited budget. Fingers crossed this will work!
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