considerations

a lot of thinking happening these days

looking, thinking and then looking again

mostly at cloth

below are three pieces of soy milk pigment painted cloth from my first attempt, each interesting to me in their own quirky way

the gold coloured one was laid over some of my pressed flowers and leaves from the Yukon, the mottled one was a mop-up rag used to clean the excess pigment off the vinyl after the cloth had dried and the bluish one at the end was painted from the "dump pot" (the receptacle where the paint dregs leftover from each of the day's painting trials get dumped and a piece of cloth gets painted with them at the end)

I'm thinking of combining them in this way though not in these proportions so some mulling going on about that

below is a piece of linen painted with watercolour paint, crumpled slightly and left to dry in that state

it was a granulating paint so the pigments have settled in an interesting way - this one is pale as I want to print on top of it with a piece of driftwood I found a while back - the bark is still attached and it's cracked and and textured in a most interesting way

I've sealed it with varnish and now just waiting for that to dry - in the meanwhile I'm debating whether to print with paint or ink... and with what colour...

the final considering is focused on the cloth below - a shibori-style very small piece of linen

the colour is rather regular across the surface of the cloth, the pigments didn't settle out along the folds and dips though the cloth has retained the texture of the process

I pressed it with the iron but it wouldn't flatten at all - I suppose it will eventually but I'm thinking now of leaving it as it is

the pattern is like diamonds and the way the light hits the folds emphasizes that

painting cloth, either with soy pigment paint or watercolour is an imprecise process, with each pigment behaving in it's own way, usually because of it's weight

you can make some adjustments for that but there are still enough other variables like the weight of the cloth and the warmth of the day that will have their say in the outcome

and that is usually where the magic is