Tag Archives | Experimenting/Arting

Dying with Sharpies and Alcohol: Part Two

By Ellen Lindner on March 18, 2018 in Uncategorized

In Part One I showed you how to mark large irregular circle shapes. Now, let’s learn how to make smaller flowers.

I did this sample on a t-shirt and I wanted the design to be on the front only. Therefore, I put a baking sheet inside the shirt.

Draw 5 small dots with a Sharpie.

Add a few drops of alcohol in the center of the dots. It will wick outward, taking the pigment with it.

Add more if additional bleeding is desired, but be sure to add it only in the center. Eventually, the color will travel far enough to create a petal effect. Some colors change as they become diluted.

These yellow-green dots turned into the yellow flowers you see below.

Once dry, details can be added with a thin Sharpie, if desired.

When dry, heat set in the dryer for 20 minutes and you’re done!

You can also make all-over delicate designs. The examples below were done with a black marker (yes, black) which turned purple and bled when lightly sprayed. It’s an interesting effect.

I’ve shown you these methods done on cotton fabric. They can also be used on silk, but the color will bleed MUCH more, giving a lovely water color effect.

I’m sure there are many more things that can be done with this concept. The basic principle is this: alcohol will wick into dry areas, taking the color with it. You can use this knowledge to control the movement of color: add alcohol on the left of the pigment if you want the color to move right, and vice versa. Or, of course, you can spray the entire design for overall bleeding.

Have fun playing!

Ellen Lindner

Dying with Sharpies and Alcohol: Part One

By Ellen Lindner on March 16, 2018 in Uncategorized

While at the retreat, I attended a demo about dying fabric with Sharpies (permanent markers) and rubbing alcohol (isopropyl.) I already knew alcohol would make Sharpies bleed, but I’d never seen this particular application.

This is the sort of result you can expect. Cool, right?

And this is how you do it:
– Stretch fabric over a drinking glass or vase.
– Secure fabric with two rubber bands.
– Color the top of the fabric with Sharpies. (The colors will bleed so choose ones that will look good together.)
– Spray the top of the fabric, generously, with alcohol.
– You’re done! The alcohol will quickly wick down the sides, taking the Sharpie color with it. Because it’s alcohol it will evaporate quickly and you’ll be done in no time.

Here are a couple of in-progress examples from our retreat.

Here they are drying. The left one, below, is the same one shown on the left above.

It’s that easy!

Here’s our teacher, Cathy Heeter, “showing off” a shirt she had made with this technique. She matched the colors to this pair of pants.

Once home, I decided to play with this on my own, on a t-shirt.

However, they didn’t bleed quite to my liking, so I sprayed them some more. That did the trick. Can you see the additional bleeding below?

These were my results.

I was very happy with them. After the shirt dried I threw it in the dryer for 20 minutes of heat setting.

Later, I added some definition by drawing an outline with a thin Sharpie. (Not diluted this time.) This is purely optional, but I like the effect.

BTW, I put the glass containers inside the shirt, so I was working with the front only. I’ll bet you could do it either way.

In Part Two I show you how to make the small flowers and other details.

Ellen Lindner

Individual Projects

By Ellen Lindner on March 1, 2018 in Uncategorized

The retreat provided plenty of time for everyone to work on their own projects. I decided on a very difficult approach to my project and therefore made slow progress. I made some great scraps, though.

(I’ll show you the in-progress craziness when I write a future post about said project.)

I think Barbie Swanson‘s scraps are all going to be monochromatic. 🙂

Marian Zielinksi creates wonderful pieces with sun printing. She gave us an excellent demo! The light areas are created with everything from Easter grass, to rocks.

Becky Stack worked on an awesome tree. She’s working on making it look 3D and I think she’s well on her way.

Sheilana Massey brought this finished project to show us. Isn’t it awesome? It’s created with a technique devised by Mary Pal.

Annette Boncek worked on a 4-panel piece about the environment.

These photos are a SMALL sampling of all the inventive work going on. The atmosphere was electric with creativity, but calm and relaxed in our beautiful surroundings.

Ellen Lindner

It all Started with Beautiful Fabric

By Ellen Lindner on January 14, 2018 in Uncategorized

Back in July I bought this beautiful painted piece of fabric from Pat Pauly.

Isn’t it gorgeous? I knew it could be the start of something wonderful. The only problem is that the scale of this fabric is much larger than I normally use. Which meant that I didn’t have other similarly scaled fabrics to work with. Still, I thought I could feature this inspiration fabric and add simpler fabrics to it.

First, I had to figure out how much of this fabric to use and a rough idea of the size of the quilt. I decided to use half of the fabric.

Then, I auditioned how I might cut it and reassemble it. Folding helped me visualize the new shape of the fabric.

So, I did this. The piece on the right has been turned 180 degrees.

Next, I began to audition other fabrics. I thought these looked pretty good.

At every turn, I used the starting fabric to help me make decisions. Such as the angles for the side pieces. I wanted them to enhance the angular nature of the starting fabric’s pattern. See what I mean?

Here’s the left side completed. (That is, pinned.)

And here’s the entire background when I THOUGHT it was finished.

I decided that one of the yellow fabrics on the right showed up too much, so I had to address that. Trial and error!

Thus far, I’ve shown you only the background. But I was also working on an idea for a foreground motif. I’ll show you that next time.

What would you do?

Ellen Lindner

What I Learned in 2017

By Ellen Lindner on December 30, 2017 in Uncategorized

My experiments and play this year have taught me a lot. Some of it has produced good results and some of it has taught me what to AVOID. All of which is valuable.

I learned more about abstract composition.

And how NOT to get transparency with fabric.

I tried my hand at deconstructed screen printing, and loved the results.

I learned to blend layers in Photoshop Elements. What fun!

I learned how to make hexies.

AND I painted directly onto a quilt!

Just a few of my adventures! What have you learned this year?

Ellen Lindner

Holding My Mouth Just Right

By Ellen Lindner on December 16, 2017 in Uncategorized

I recently added paint to a quilt! Gulp! This is something I’ve only done once or twice, so I definitely had to get my courage up.

It helped that I had done a bunch of painted exercises a few months ago. So, I did some practice samples, held my mouth just right and gave it a go.

I had started this quilt at Quilting by the Lake, back in July, and had completed the fabric composition. After putting the quilt away for a few months, this is where I picked it up. I wanted to add some sheer swirling elements to the background. With paint. Gulp again.

I had previously done some experimenting about how to best add a sheer layer with monoprinting. From that I knew that a certain scrap of shelf liner worked well. Like this. I thought it looked quite good.

But, it pretty much disappeared in the lighter patterned areas. Clearly, I’d need to beef it up some how. Back to experimenting.

I figured out I could stencil on another light coat of paint to get my desired effect. Like this.

I used freezer paper to mask out the quilt areas that I wanted to stay paint free.

And this was the result. I was happy with it.

At this point, it was time to start thinking about the quilting design. I’ll show you what I did in the next post, plus something a little unexpected.

Ellen Lindner

Making a Mobile

By Ellen Lindner on November 15, 2017 in Uncategorized

A few months ago I was playing around with paint quite a bit and using a lot of palette paper. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s sorta waxy, so it can handle a lot of moisture.

Often, the paint dried in interesting ways, so I decided to save the papers. (Yep, I did it again: saved something I had no idea how I’d ever use.)

This week I had some down time, so I cut out the paint blobs.

See what I mean about them being interesting?

I thought maybe I could make them into a mobile. All white or with color? I decided on a mixture.

At some point I had heard that you should build a mobile from the bottom up and that was good advice. I used button twist (heavy thread) and started knotting and threading shapes on. I let the bottom shapes dangle, but I wanted the others to hang semi parallel to the floor. With that in mind I tried to puncture each piece at the center of gravity. (One of my aviation terms, simply meaning balance point.) This sometimes took more than one try.

After adding a piece, I’d make a small knot a little ways down the thread an add the next shape. I kept the colorful side facing down, since I knew it would be viewed from below. ( I did a lot of lifting to look up at my progress.)

I used short pieces of plastic straws as my cross structures, again finding the center of gravity for each one before adding it to item above.

I think it turned out pretty cool.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was the mobile moving. And that’s the best part! It’s sorta like visual wind chimes. (Only better.)

What experimenting have you tried lately?

Ellen Lindner

At Least I Learned Something

By Ellen Lindner on September 17, 2017 in Uncategorized

After so much experimentation with paint and collage I was anxious to see if and how it might translate to fabric. I gave myself this assignment:
– Make 4 small collages, each with paint used at least once.
– Experiment with different ways to get a sheer/transparent effect.
– Start with materials immediately on my work table.
– Start by adding something sheer to every stage.

These were my initial materials, all of which were lying around, (i.e. not properly put away.) They included some hexies which had been stitched to a background piece of muslin, small fused scraps and sheer fabrics.

I cut up the hexies and used them as part of the backgrounds.

I expected the finished compositions to be about 5 x 7. I used a paper frame (above) to help me arrange the hexies for each. These were my starting compositions.

I’ll show you some of what I did. However, I don’t consider any of them finished. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t very happy with any of them. But, I managed to answer my questions, so then I felt find about putting them away.

This is as far as I got on the orange one. As you can see, a layer of organza greatly obscured the layer below. It’s also got paint on top of everything you see here. Except for the little black line which I added with stitching.

This red and green one got a transparent layer with over printing. I liked that effect. Yellow lines were fused on and organza was added to the right side only.

This blue one was pretty much a dud. I added a gridded sheer and then melted parts of it with a heat gun. I didn’t like the wounds. I also used heavy stitching as a transparent layer. It worked pretty well, but was too much work for my liking.

This one was quickly getting overworked and it had questionable color choices. But, I did like the line I added with two lines of stitching.

And here it is when it got so ugly I couldn’t face it anymore!

With all this ugliness, what did I learn?
– I don’t really like sheer fabrics as translucent layers. They tend to obscure the lower layers too much.
– I DO like allover printing as a textural/sheer layer. I can see myself using it again.
– I like adding a black line with machine stitching. I’d like to explore hand stitching it too.

I think I’ve now well and thoroughly put this episode of exploration to bed. On to the next thing!

Ellen Lindner

Online Class with Jane Davies

By Ellen Lindner on September 13, 2017 in Uncategorized

After getting so much out of Jane Davies’ book about abstract elements I decided to take an online “class” with her. I put class in quotes, because this was not interactive. You just download the content and do the exercises on your own. More like a book – although she does have interactive classes, too.

This was MUCH more challenging, primarily because it involved a lot of – to me – tricky painting techniques I wasn’t familiar with.

The first exercise was easy enough, however: paint a lot of paper in a monochromatic colorway, then combine it in a gridded collage.

I made two.

The ease stopped there. The next assignment was to make a horizontal collage with different background colors top and bottom. That part was fine. But then, I was supposed to sort of merge the background and foreground. This is what Jane does so brilliantly that is completely foreign to me!

I did 4 of these, with my most successful 2 shown above. In places, I pulled the color of the collage into the background and in other places I painted a background color onto the collage. I had no idea what I was doing! But, it WAS interesting.

Next came an assignment that started with a cruciform composition. That part was okay, but the quadrants were each supposed to be different, and again, the two were supposed to be merged with paint. Again, lots of completely random attempts on my part.

This next 3 examples are so hideous I hesitate to show them to you. Ugh!

Again, these were cruciforms, with paint added everywhere and then wiped off. I completely overworked these three!

Finally, it was time to put it all together. After watching her video twice I was ready to start. First, I referenced my earlier sample papers showing a variety of ways to make marks with paint.

For this assignment I followed Jane’s example of painting over every single layer, (until I got to the last few elements.) Here, the orange circle and the black lines are not painted over. Everything else is.

Finally, I had a little bit of success I think.

Things I learned:
– I love the look of partially veiled paint, but I don’t know how to do it.
– I love the idea of foreground and background merging, but I don’t know how to do that with paint either. Maybe with fabric?
– I continue to be entranced with skinny wild lines, inspired by some of Jane’s work.

Questions going forward:
– Can I get a veiled look with fabric? Maybe with sheers or overprinting with paint?
– What’s the best way to add those skinny lines to my fabric art?
– Can I successfully merge both fabric and paint in my art???

You know me: I’ll HAVE to do some more experimenting as I try to answer these questions. Stay tuned.

Ellen Lindner

More Black and White Exercises

By Ellen Lindner on August 16, 2017 in Uncategorized

One of the great things about taking a class is that you get to learn from everyone around you. In my class with Rosalie Dace, she was very good about going around the room and coaching everyone. And she didn’t mind eavesdropping, so I overheard quite a few good tips.

I thought you’d enjoy seeing how some of my classmates tackled their black and white exercises. Each one started with a single shape that was then altered, multiplied (maybe) and explored at least three more times.

When Stephanie alternated the values in her shapes she got something that looked almost like a rib cage.