Chapter 11 - stage 1 - decorated papers and subdividing images

I was going to work in white, but my bleaching of 2 different black papers produced yellows and browny pinks so I might go with a range of natural shades from very light to very dark.  I really like the bluey greens in the third sheet too - decisions, decisions.

I tried a range of printing and bleaching using cocktail sticks, cotton tips, feathers, sponge shapes, and an almost empty reel of tatting cotton with an interesting circular texture.  Some of the papers were first patterned with a white wax crayon. Some of the white papers were coloured with tea and some printing was done with tea. This was quite hard to get a clean image - too wet and it just ran, too dry and no marks. Some of the bleached papers were over-bleached with a second method. 

The relief papers are only for ideas as they will not be amenable to cutting up! Seeds are scattered all over as it is. The softer samples are made with flour and water paste and I used this t hold the rice and beans and seeds. I rubbed the samples with a graphite stick to see what textures would result.

Finally, I chose a selection of my digital manipulations as they had some gorgeous textures.

I t was hard to settle on a few photographs because there were so many delicious ones to choose from and I'd had such a good time in Adobe creating all sorts of different images.

I chose the icicle, hedge and leaf series to use for the designing exercise. Some divisions are suggested by the original photo, some by the digital manipulation and some abstract. Some were drawn with the idea of 3-D interpretations.