Before I start to post my working for this chapter, I wanted to take a step back and take a final look at chapter 2, working with handwriting. I felt after I'd posted this chapter that maybe I hadn't exercised myself adequately. So while I was waiting for the glue to dry for this chapter I went back a bit and had a go at doing a bit more of the things I'd enjoyed
And combining doodling with blocks of text
Chapter 3
Anyway on with the focus of this post. I made a number of glue writing bases, made on a very humid day so the plates took absolutely ages to dry (over 36 hours!). I tried one with undiluted pva which made a rounded / hard profile for rubbing and some cheap kids pva which was already runnier and made a softer profile for rubbing. The firm PVA made for rubbings that were clear and focused but the softer pva made for rubbings that could be at times very abstract, and really interesting. If I were to take this exercise further I would maybe try for a firmer profile in abstract shapes / runs on a number of different bases and then combine rubbings on a single sheet.
Firstly though I tried out a number of ways to write with the pva and eventually found an old icing bottle, first time I found a use for it. Bought years ago at one of those pampered chef events, with a reasonably small tip.
Undiluted pva
Runnier PVA
For mark making tools I was limited to pastels, coloured crayons and clear wax crayon.
I made rubbings on various surfaces including: newspaper, grease proof paper, black paper, tissue paper white copier paper and fabric. I got particularly good results with black paper and one or two nice pieces with tissue and fabric.
I started off by securing the plate to a base with some tacky masking tape, to avoid the plate moving under the paper as opposed to the paper moving over the plate.
Newspaper
It's hard these days to get newspaper that is entirely in black print on plain paper. Most are highly coloured and this got in the way of successful rubbings for me. I did't feel this was a surface worth pursuing - but I'm happy to be advised further.
Black and blue wax
Wax and watercolour wash.
Greaseproof paper
Firstly with pastels
And then rubbing gold wax gilt on the surface as a base, prior to black crayon. This worked really well on grease proof paper, but nowhere near as successfully on other bases I tried out.
White wax crayon moved fractionally twice to give an unfocused effect plus a sepia based colour wash and the base made with softer PVA
Tissue Paper
I got some simple yet good effects with tissue paper. Using the firmer PVA plate with two colours.
Because the paper is so thin and fragile I felt I was only able to rub very gently over the surface in various colour layers and also only really in pastels which are themselves very soft. This produced some wonderfully abstract rubbings on the softer PVA plate
This is my favourite, rubbing very gentrly on overlapping diagonals. It has an abstract quality to it but also looks remarkably like marble!
Black Paper
I did the bulk of my rubbings on white copier paper and black paper. Starting off simply with crayon in layers.
Trying the gilt wax out with black paper was nowhere near as successful as I'd hoped, it didn't spread as well as on the greaseproof paper but it was interresting to work with
Caran Dache water colour crayons as a water wash over clear wax crayon
Concentric colour circles , prob the best effect I achieved with black paper
and then this page with a little gold brushed on
With white copier paper
Layering up with crayon pastels etc in various colours and in various directions that is turning the paper in opposite directions and on the diagonal - I think this was probably my favourite simple effect on paper.
Adding watercolour washes Activity 2
Fabric
I started off rubbing with pastels....
...and whilst this produced some lovely strong colours I felt it was simply reproducing the same images I had created previously. So I had a good think and remembered I had some transfoil knocking around which I loathe and have never really used, but having had some success with the gold rub I thought I'd give this a go as a base before rubbing and indeed it worked really well, (apart from completely writing off my iron as I had forgotten how to use transfoil) I'm glad I finally found a use for it.
Aiming for a Byzantine effect with bronze transfoil
Using the plates as a resist.
Alas I'd lost Pan's Labyrinth by this stage so made a few more plates to play with, and they dried really quickly as the humidity had changed.
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