brought to you by the letter M

The theme today was M-E-S-S-Y. I spent a few hours in the studio creating a large amount of mayhem. First up was the citrasolve paper thing that is in the latest Cloth Paper Scissors magazine.


I've backed off on buying magazines lately, running out of room on the bookcase so I've gotten selective about which issues I buy, even on the ones that I really like. I'd seen this technique on a couple of other blogs and thought I'd give it a shot. Basically the idea is to alter the pages of the magazine with the citrasolve and you get some groovy backgrounds for paper art.

I decided to torture two different magazines: the one shown above that focuses on photography and the other was a National Geographic (which seems to be the magazine of choice of the author of the article and other people who have tried it).

I followed the directions and waited the prescribed time and then began to pull it apart. I wasn't real thrilled with the way it looked, most of the images were still fully intact and I put a lot of citrasolve on there so that wasn't it. The paper quality of the photo magazine was really excellent, much heavier then the national geographic so I wondered if that was it.

I ended up "helping" the ink squash around by taking a page that only had text on it and blotting it and wiping it across the other pages. It gave me better results. It also made my hand look like this:


In retrospect, I should have worn gloves.

I panicked a little when I started pulling the pages out of the magazine so they could dry. I ended up laying them out in the hallway, it was the only place long enough:


I started pulling apart the National Geographic while those were drying and got part way through it before I decided I hated the way it was coming out. Many of the images were dark in the issue I used and basically the black ink took over and made everything into mud. Plus (and this could have been my weirdness) they smelled funny to me.

The pages from the photography didn't smell (outside of the overwhelming orange) but the national geographic just plain stank to me. I ended up pitching that magazine and keeping the pages from the first magazine:


I'm not real sure how well I like the results. Granted, they are meant to be backgrounds so by the time all is said and done, they will be a small element of whatever they are used in. I'm reserving judgement for the moment.

If I ever did this again, I would choose a magazine with lots of bright colors and maybe even go so far as to pull out the pages with a lot of black ink on them. We'll see how much use I get out of the pile above (I ended up with about 40 pages) before I go make more.

While my hallway slowly began to smell like an overripe orange grove, I huddled in my studio and decided to paint up some more of the batik fabric I had left from Rayna's class.

Batik is obviously not my forte, but the pieces I'm getting out of what I printed in her class will be worthwhile. Here they are with the backgrounds painted and the wax ironed out:


The grey/blue fabric (second from the left) was painted with straight up acrylic. Won't do that again, doesn't look nearly as rich as the others that were painted with jacquard. Now that Joann's is selling jacquard, I'm not so hesitant to go nuts with it.

Got a ton of things to do tomorrow so I don't know if I'll get to painting the details on these tomorrow. I'm going to do one more X piece (I've renamed them to Strike 1, Strike 2 and the last one will be Strike 3) and the rest are kind of up in the air.

The westie is getting his stitches out tomorrow. I'm sure he'll be happy, he's been attempting to run around when he plays with his toys but he always stops suddenly and then just sort of stands there with a bummed out look on his face. I'm not expecting him to be pleased about heading back to the vet of doom (his words, not mine) but it'll be a short visit and then we can start going for walks again. And he can get a bath - two things that make westie-land all happy.