Playing with Textures

The dawn of a new year.At the end of December 06 we headed off to the Woodford Folk Festival to spend the end of the year and begining of 07 relaxing and enjoying the sounds of music. The above photo ,taken from near our campsite, is the first rays of the sun on January 1st 2007. As well as all the great music we listened to I also did a workshop with local artist, Noela Mills, but more about that later.

The above piece of collage I made before the festival, little did I know it would be a similar technique to the piece I would do at the workshop! After a recent spate of buying books on collage art I decided to try out a few techniques on a small frontspiece for my Woodford journal.

I covered a piece of paper with craft glue and after crumpling up a piece of tissue paper stuck it down onto the glued page going over the page with a glue loaded paint brush pushing the tisuue around forming interesting shapes and texture.I also added chipboard letters of my name. I let the piece dry and then painted it. A coat of brown paint first and when that had dried, painted green,copper,purple and pewter paint across the crumpled surface. The paint picked up the ridges creating a great textural finish. The look was metallic.To highten the semigloss finish, and to seal it, I then painted the page with varnish.

Now to the workshop with Noela. I learnt lots. The techinque Noela used was similar to the way I had done my pre-festival journal frontspiece. We used PVA glue to stick our bits of tissue paper to a page of copy paper. The resulting page in the above photo.When it had dried we scrumbled metallic paint across the surface and finished the piece with highlights of gold foil.

The page was then cut to size to fit on an A5 book and glued into place with double sided tape.

The above photo shows the final art piece. Noela's workshop was delightful and enthuses me to try more of this type of techique and to see what else I can discover while playing with textures and paint.