Abstracts

I have other new sketches and painting to post... maybe later, but one thing I've been playing with for the past month is 'masa', or rice paper.  On one of the art forums I frequent, there are monthly project and idea kickers, and this one intrigued me enough to give it a go.

First step was to order the paper.  Ten sheets of masa from Dick Blick for a very reasonable price, and I was surprised to find that each sheet was 22"x30"!  Woo hoo!  I have enough to do some serious play.

The idea here is to use the natural fiberous nature of the paper to do some abstract work.  For this first one I crumpled the paper (about 5"x7") and soaked it in water.  Then I dropped in some ink (Noodler's Red-Black) which feathered nicely.  While the paper was still wet I touched some watercolor pigments onto the paper.  At the end, I decided that I liked it best standing up on end.

Next up, same basic idea, but I used a few different tools to make marks.  Again, ink and watercolor, but this time I added some spatters of irridescent medium to the page.

 

For the third one, I pre-painted the paper with streaks of color, then dropped in a bunch of ink.  You'll notice that the inks I've been using are not waterproof, so they react beautifully on the wet paper.

On the next three, I did the crumple and soak to the paper, but then added some origami-style folding (cone and fan folds) before dropping in - yep, more ink and watercolor.

I picked up some india ink, to see what would happen if I used permanent, waterproof ink to start with.  We'll see what happens.