New String Quilt Project
This was just a relaxing weekend. I watched a couple of movies, we played Scrabble, and I spent some time having fun in the craft room. I trimmed down a stack of string blocks to give me something to do while I watched part of a movie. Here they are before de-papering. (I used old phone books for my foundation.)
As you can see, I went with blue and grey fabrics for this project. I’m still pondering how I’ll set them. There are few options still up for consideration.
In the meantime, I’m just having fun with some simple treadle sewing. This part of the project is the most fun, and it’ll be over before I know it, so I guess I’ll just have to find another string quilt project to work on, when that time comes!
Kuretake Gansai Tambi Granulating Watercolors
I have a new set of paints to play with, which is always fun! These have been out for a while, and I kept going back and forth on whether I really wanted them, because they seemed like something that would be interesting to use, but probably not something you’d use as frequently as some other art supplies… In the end, I decided they were worth having.
So, what makes them special? Though they’re sold as granulating paints, they’re not so much granulating (in the traditional sense) as they are color-separating. Dry, in the pan, they look brown. You can’t easily tell one color from the next. But when you mix them well with plenty of water and put them on the page, they behave in the most intriguing ways, separating into two colors as they settle and dry.
After swatching the new paints (there are five in the set), I had a couple of ideas to give them their first real try in a way that I hoped would be relaxing and fun.
For this one, I just mixed a little paint into plenty of water on a ceramic palette, then doodle-painted a pattern, freehand. I wanted to leave blank spaces between the different areas of paint, to keep it all from running together too much and to allow plenty of opportunities for the colors to separate. All this was painted with one color from the palette—Aurora Orange, which separates into orange and green:
The lines are kind of messy, but to be fair, I wasn’t going for perfection. Let’s call it “organic”. I’m not done with this. The original plan was to go back and add details in black pen, but I’m not sure exactly what I’ll end up doing. If nothing else, it was educational to see how the paint behaves.
One thing to remember is that this was just cheap cellulose watercolor paper. It might be worth trying it with cotton paper, too, to see if that makes a difference in how it acts.
For my other initial experiment, I started by doodling an abstract(ish) pattern on watercolor paper, using a cheap waterproof pen. I let it set overnight, then painted part of the pattern with a second of the new colors—Aurora Violet. After that had dried, I went back and painted the remaining areas of the pattern with a couple of shades of blue-grey—just regular watercolor, not special color-separating or granulating paints.
This photo isn’t the best, and I’m still not finished with this one, either, but it’ll do for a progress shot:
Again, not perfection, but fun. It’s interesting to see how the color separates and, yes, granulates. It’s meditative, painting in those crazy shapes—perfect for relaxing while listening to music or an audiobook (or a radio program podcast about the dangers of ASI and the fact that the world as we know it may be on the brink of inevitable changes that will make it unrecognizable in the near future). Ahh, so relaxing! 🙃
