TGIF — Gothic Arches

Two new/old goth­ic arch­es. I found these while I was purg­ing the work­ing projects piles. They aren’t much to look at being just a cou­ple of exper­i­ments with back­ground cre­ation techniques.

The birds and flow­ers was based on a piece of paper tow­el that I had used as a wiper for water col­ors in anoth­er project. I added more col­or by drop­ping left­overs from the palette onto the tow­el and then let it run and dry with­out inter­fer­ence. Instead of cut­ting the back­ground out with scis­sors I used a fine point­ed brush and ran a bead of dark brown water­col­or around the shape I want­ed and when the tow­el was damp through both lay­ers I pulled the it apart along the water line. It made a nice tonal back­ground to which I added some wall paper cutouts and feath­er from my parrot.

collage

The bal­loons was an exper­i­ment in using ges­so in mak­ing back­grounds. I col­laged paper and then stamped images on the back­ground. When the inks had dried I put a thin lay­er of ges­so over the entire sur­face. I put cutouts and a bit of string on the top.

Ges­so does give an inter­est­ing tex­ture to what goes on top if it. Also a good deal of “tooth” if you want to work with some­thing like pas­tels or crayons. But I don’t think I’ll be using it much. It just makes every­thing too muted.

The bor­ders are metal­lic pens that I had just bought. The red is a brush pen from Pen­tel. it takes a lot of coats to get a good cov­er­age. (Red and green ones are com­mon­ly on sale around Xmas.) The gold is Kry­lon’s gold leaf­ing pen. This one is worth hunt­ing for. A few tips. Shake before using — a lot. Run a test line of about 4 inch­es on scrap paper to get the ink flow­ing well. You’ll get a very con­sis­tent line after that. Work in a well ven­ti­lat­ed room — this thing stinks of it’s sol­vent. (Propy­lene Gly­col Monomethyl Ether.)

The cap­tion “Stolen Kiss­es Require an Accom­plice” is by Texas Bix Ben­der. (A name I could vote for.)

About the Author

Lara Harriger